I have just installed ndiswrapper's driver for my machine. Before, I could see my card (bcm4318), but I couldn't actually connect. This is a known issue with the bc4/bcm43xx/ssb kernel modules. Here's what I did:
1. removed the bc4 and bcm4xx modules
2. installed ndiswrapper
3. shutdown
4. got the bcm15.inf and bcm15.sys files
5. used ndiswrapper -i on said files
6. ndiswrapper -m
7. shutdown
8. ifconfig -a
...
and then I got an eth1 -- my wired card -- and lo. No wireless card. ndiswrapper ate my card

Here is the output of ndiswrapper -l:

A few things I may be wrong, but I need help checking for:
1. How do you see if ndiswrapper does it's stuff at boot, and if it isn't, how do you either tell it to do it's thing at boot or from the command line after the system is started up?
2. Did I only install ndiswrapper, but not ndiswrapper-utils? I don't think so, but I have no way to know: I don't know how to check. How do I go about checking (note: I downloaded the latest version from sourceforge's ndiswrapper page).
3. "alternate driver: bcm43xx" from ndiswrapper's output... I blacklisted it in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, and did rmmod bcm43xx. Could it be that it's still using the alt. driver, which is now acting up because it doesn't have ssb or something (pure speculation, I have no idea what's going on here, I'm just reading tutorials)? How do I get rid of bcm43xx?


Thanks in advanced for any kind souls who decide to help

you need the bcmwl5a for the 4318

1. dmesg | grep ndis

2.should probably install ndiswrapper-utils

3. mine still says alternate driver bcm43xx as well, working fine

I used the bcmwl5a driver, and I can now see the card. The hardware button also toggles it on and off, and has a light now. But I think there's still comething wrong: I can search for networks, but kwifimanager leaves the 'mode' part blank, and when I try to connect the card goes into ad-hoc mode. So I iwconfig wlan0 mode Managed, restart kwifimanager and try again: kwifi automatically switches it into ad hoc when I try to connect to my router.

1. Output of dmesg | grep ndis:
version 1.48 loaded (smp=yes, preempt=no)
driver bcmwl5 (Broadcom,03/23/2006, 4.40.18.0) loaded
using IRQ 22
registered new interface driver ndiswrapper

2. Done. Restarted, same problem.

3. Good to know, at least now I know that's not the problem.

Thanks for the reply.