Ok so i am an intermediate with linux, i can work my way around a terminal pretty easily and for the past three weeks I have been trying to get my Broadcom BCM4311 wireless card to work in Backtrack 3(remote-exploit distro slax based), to no avail. I have tried using bcm-fwcutter to extract firmware and ndiswrapper for the driver. I got it to the point to where i can put it in monitor mode and managed mode and have it detect wireless network but when I try to actually connect it goes and trys then every time says connection failed. im using the ndiswrapper WPA supplicant. I remember when i got it to work in ubuntu and kubuntu that i had to enable restricted drivers. Any one got any ideas?

Backtrack is used by professional penetration testers. An odd choice for a normal Linux user.

bcm-fwcutter is for extracting parts from a driver for the b43 kernel driver. Ndiswrapper uses an entire windows ndis driver. You may need to blacklist the b43 module if you are using ndiswrapper. I.E. if `/sbin/lsmod' lists the b43 driver. Having both drivers will cause a conflict.

WPA-supplicant is a separate package, and is used for any wireless device, not just ndiswrapper.

If you can scan for access points using the ndiswrapper driver, the wireless device is most likely working. At this stage, many people will disable WPA encryption on their router and configure their device for a static configuration or DHCP. When the device connects, they would then configure WPA authentication.

Make sure you install the wireless-tools package. It supplies the iwconfig, iwlist & iwspy programs.
Your network configuration and WPA configuration may be located in the same configuration tool. You could instead manually edit the ifcfg-wlan0. Look in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0. There should be an ifcfg manpage describing what the options mean.

Good Luck!

I know, I am currently A+, Security+ and Network+ certified and I am working on CEH Certification; all practice attacks will be done on my own network.

To the topic, I got it working yesterday. I was using the wrong firmware and I decided to uninstall everything i had done(it was getting clogged) and reinstall using the version I had used when I installed Ubuntu. After a quick restart and realizing that I gave KWLAN the wron ESSID for my network it worked. Not to say well, it is very slow despite my "extra high speed" internet connection. Am working on this issue ATM. Thank you for the help.