Almost have wireless working! But, I need a small bit of help. I have ndiswrapper installed, drivers ready, but I don't understand how to do this:
I tried going on without touching this, but as I expected, no luck.

THe good news is something rare on my computer. Everything went perfectly, I even had iwconfig already installed, and ifconfig wlan0 scan even picked up my wireless network!! But this is where I got lost.

Bascially you need to use iwconfig to set the SSID and WEP key (if you use encryption) and request an IP address. Really, most of the details you need are in the iwconfig man page for configuring the card. I think what the quote referes to is that a lot of distro's have their own way of storing configurations. In Slackware it is done with a script, in Suse you can use Yum. To be honest, I don't know what Mandrake uses, but if your system recognizes wlan0 as a wireless card, then the usual way you configure a network card should offer you wireless options.

I don't really get it. I don't know the regular way, so does anyone else know what to do. Just to be clear, I forgot to say it last time, I use mandrake 10.1

Are you using the instructions here? If so, all you have to do is follow the instructions exactly, if it's the iwconfig part that you're up to. I set up two more mdk10.1 systems using those instruction earlier this week with no problems (well... except for hitting a wrong key ). Use the ifconfig to bring it up. Put ndiswrapper in /etc/modprobe.preload. Set up a connection through the MCC graphical utility, if necessary.

Actually, I figured out that all I had to do was type dhclient! I recently discovered the LQ wiki, and it came in handy here.