I'm running Mandrake 10.0 with ndiswrapper under a 2.6-3-7kernel.
I was stupid enough to buy the Linksys WMP54G wireless adapter, and now having poured over many forums and tutorials with little progress, I still find myself with a card that doesn't load when I boot up the system. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do it with the bios to get the led turned on, and I know it's not an issue with windows.

When I run lspci -v the output is:

01:0a.0 Network controller: Unknown device 1814:0201 (rev 01)
Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8098
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
Memory at e6800000 (32-bit, non prefetchable) [disabled] [size=8k]
Capabilities [40] Power Management version 2

Ndiswrapper 1.0 recognizes that the hardware and the driver (rt2500)
are present. Any help would be appreciated, seeing as I can't get any farther without turning
on the device itself.

hmm, I'm playing with ndiswrapper @ mo too, have a look at the install guide for ndiswrapper:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/p...p/Installation

works for me, but I can't seem to assign it an IP...