Ive been trying to get wireless working on backtrack 1 for about 4 hours now... I read a forum in here, and did was axo reccomended to someone else, but i still cant get this thing working.

I have a wmp54g linksys pci card.
I used modprobe ath_pci then lsmod |grep ath_pci and I get this

ath_pci 64028 0
ath_rate_onoe 7816 1 ath_pci
wlan 116124 2 ath_pci, ath_rate_onoe
ath_hal 147408 1 ath_pci

I have no idea what that is or if its usefull.
When i try iwconfig it says there are no devices.
I try'd using the wireless manager, but it just says disabled.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

While rather quite the newbie myself, I had a similar problem.

I had to use a USB-receiver to get my wireless network. To do this, I had to ask around a bit on Ubuntuforums, 'till someone told me that my USB-receiver was of a certain chipset, and gave me a link to the driver I needed. I then used ndiswrapper to get it up and running. However, the router was a very cheap and bad one, so I bought a new one when I got a new laptop with built-in wireless.

Try Google for the model of WiFi-card, and "chipset".

Once you have found this, if you can, search for that chipset, if the driver isn't listed on same page.

As I said, I am a newbie myself, but I have had a similar problem. I don't remember the commands to use with ndiswrapper, and I have been told there are more ways than using that to solve the problem.

Search these forums, or the Ubuntuforums, for your cardmodel, and you will probably get a better explanation than I have just given you.

Sorry for not being able to give you more specific instructions, but I know very little myself. This advice is the advice that worked for me.

That’s because ath_pci is for wireless cards using the atheros chipset. You stated you had a “wmp54g linksys pci card”, which (according to this page) uses either a ralink or broadcom chipset (both of which have native linux drivers — no need for ndiswrapper). The easiest way to be sure of the chipset is to use the utility “lspci”, which should tell you all the chips available through your pci bus.

Then, depending on what chipset you seem to have (if you can’t tell, just post the output of lspci here, and we’ll see if we can tell), install either the broadcom bcm43xx drivers or the ralink rt2x00 drivers. (NOTE: for the broadcom drivers, you will most likely need to use a binary-blob firmware with bcm43xx-fwcutter).

I'm having the same problem myself. I entered lspci and this is what it rendered:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8038 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 14)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. Unknown device 001c (rev 01)
0a:09.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller
0a:09.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD)

I know my laptop is equipped with a Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, but what should I be looking for?

First off, Welcome to LQ!..... And second (and my apologies in advance if this seems rude) but are you sure about that? The reason I'm asking is this:

The first one (the Marvell card) I believe is your wired ethernet card. The second one, the Atheros, is likely your wireless card. I'm not seeing anything related to an Intel 3945, and those usually do show up in lspci. What does iwconfig show?

Chances are you're right. I went onto the Acer site to pull up what they put in my particular model. I trust your judgement on what's what more than I trust what I found. Thanks.

Offtopic question: Does Acer have the possibility to modify the hardware on their models? (Similar to Dell or otherwise) Then you'd be right to trust HangDod completely. If they don't, your best guess is still to trust HangDog as PC/laptop-manufacturers sometimes see they have done something "wrong", or to say in other terms: Less than the best they could do. And change one or two of the components, but not enough to change the model name.
If you bought the PC from the website within the week, I would defer to what they say. If you bought from a retailer or it's been more than a week (maybe two), do what HangDog says.