Hi smirnoff!
Don't give up. You will get it to work eventually. I got my BCM43xx to work, by following this:
(I'm also a beginner)
Howto:
1. Ndiwsrapper came pre installed with my Elive Gem stable version. Just remember to use SU otherwise it will not run.
2. Downloaded the latest driver from the laptop manufacturerer. I just went to the manufacturer's support pages, and downloaded their latest windows xp driver.
3. Uncompressed the windows driver. Now you could do this by installing the driver on your windows machine.
4. Copy the two files from the driver directory that has the bcmwl5.inf AND .sys driver in it, over to the laptop that has the wireless card.
5. ndiswrapper -i /ndis/broad/bcmwl5.inf
6. ndiswrapper -l
This should show something like
# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present
Note: If is says something like the driver doesn't work, then do a 'ndiswrapper -e bcmw15', and a 'ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf' to use the other driver that is in the directory.
Note2: If it says 'driver present' but not 'hardware present', then ndiswrapper knows how to use the driver, but the driver doesn't match your hardware.
7. modprobe ndiswrapper
Which should load the driver.
8. ndiswrapper -m
Which put's the correct syntax into your modprobe.conf area, setting things up a wlan0
After this my wireless card worked.
Now, I had to type "modprobe ndiswrapper" after each reboot to make it work. The helpful IRC community fixed that for me, but I can not remember how we did that. Just ask in IRC about that one.
Out of the box Elive would only connect to my network using WEP encryption. I installed wifi-wiz and that also makes WPA encryption working.
[
students.ou.edu]
Hope you get it to work!
eViking