I'm currently trying out different distributions to figure out which one I'm going to stick with. So far, I have installed Ubuntu 8.10 but I have been trying out other live distros.

I have an iMac with the Broadcom BCM4328 wireless chipset. Ubuntu works with the card, but so far no live cds work with it. I downloaded what I believe to be correct linux drivers for it, but they need compiled.

So I boot the openSuSE Live cd, open up xterm, and try to compile, but it says it can't find the command "make". Do none of these live cds include make?

openSuSE had some problems booting, I had to manually startx to get to gnome, but once it was running, it looked nice, I just couldn't get the wireless to work, and without make I can't even try to compile and insmod new drivers.

I have some bad news for you. Even the full install doesn't have the programming suite - gcc, make ...
I tossed OpenSuse onto a virtual guest a couple of days back, and had to pull all the above (manually) so I could compile the guest additions kernel module.

I was disappointed with Osuse 11.0 being a suse user since 9.1 so I have switched over to Sabayon, a gentoo based distro. So far it has been rock solid ... try grabbing the live DVD from www.sabayon.org (not the mini edition, as it doesnt have as much), if the live DVD works for you, and I've seen a few users with the same wireless card that have it running fine, then I'm pretty sure you'll find the distro your looking for. Within a month there will be the next release, 3.5.1 which will include all the updates to the current bleeding edge. Also Sabayon 4 is hopefully coming out in december!!

Can you tell more detailed how did you installed gcc ? Thanks.

I just used yast - gcc and make from memory; let it pull in any dependencies required.