I have read other posts and am a very NEWBIE. I have installed Mandriva 9 and see a wireless card, but I cannot connect it.
I have seen posts that say if you do lshw blah blah blah and I have no clue what that means. I am an expert on Windows and a clod on Linux.
My wireless SSID does not show up in the list of networks. In fact no wirelss show there.
It says "please select your network and shows nothing.
Wired works fine.

Please help with step by step instructions.

First we will need a little more information. Is this a laptop? We need to know which wireless card you have. Go to terminal and type 'lspci' without the quote marks and post the results.

we need more information such as Laptop model, Wireless card, etc. I had a similar issue and the problem was that I didn't have the right firmware installed. please post the results of # ifconfigand # iwconfig

I went to Tools, Konsole Terminal, and got:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DBM (ICH4-M) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
02:03.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ac)
02:03.1 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ac)
02:03.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04)
02:04.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LANController (rev 02)
02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet (rev 01)

This is an x300 Dell laptop, but, I haaad the same problem when I tried it on a DELL d410 that had an Intel 2100 wireless mini pci.
Thanks,,,Circe

Where do I run these commands? Using terminal, I get nothing.

Here you go. I had to type su first to get to the root:

iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wmaster0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"DHOUSE"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thr=2352 B
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:1F:44:4E:74
inet addr:192.168.1.3 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20f:1fff:fe44:4e74/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:26637 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:15083 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:19383134 (18.4 MiB) TX bytes:2308256 (2.2 MiB)
Interrupt:11

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:526 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:526 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:39836 (38.9 KiB) TX bytes:39836 (38.9 KiB)

There are several ways to do this, one is to use ndiswrapper in which is the one I have had the best luck with the broadcom 4306 card. There is also a native linux driver that you need to install fwcutter and use the bcm43 driver. Most people like to try the latter first. Your choice.

How do I install fwcutter? I am a newbie.

We may have to wait on some help from someone who uses Mandriva, it should be listed in your package manager synaptic repositories.

I found and ran fwcutter, but I still do not see my wireless ssid in the list of networks. Any help would be appreciated.

ok Circe D. as root (sorry I didn't specify it last time) go to /var/log and type tail -f messages see if you get any error messages about your wireless connection. if not try to go to your network manager and try connecting to a wireless network by entering SSID number, password, etc and hit connect. then see if any error messages come up on that terminal screen. I run OPENSuse and on the error message it specified me where to go for the solution to my issue.
hope this help if not you could go to www.linuxwireless.org
let us know the outcome!