I got a Dell Latitude D610 Laptop from my friend I was running his windows XP for a while and then windows decided to give me the nice little blue screen of death because apparently the hard drive had bad sectors? Whatever so I replaced the hard drive with one that is only 60 GB so i now have to be very sparing of my HD space. I made 4 partitions. First partition (sda1) is a 9 GB ext 3 partition i devoted to Knoppix (Debian Install to HD) the next partition (sda2) is my 1GB swap partition for Knoppix, my 3rd partition (sda3) is a 15 GB ntfs partition that i will eventually put windows XP on when i find my CD. My last partition is a 30 GB FAT32 partition that I have devoted to sharing files between the two OS's (music, pictures, movies, documetns...)
Anyway know that you know my setup , heres by problem. I am new to linux but not too new to Unix because i have been running windows and mac os simultaneously for 10 years now, and I have a broadcom modem chipset which is apparently unsupported so I cant just go on the internet by plugging directly into my cable modem and my Intel wireless card chipset is not supported by default but there are drivers for it online. Also any time i try to run a program that requires root access i get an error "SU returned with an error" so I can't configure anything the way I want it to be.
My questions are:
1) If i download the drivers on a windows computer can i just transfer them to the linux laptop on a USB key and run them to get my wireless running?
2) Is the information I heard about my Broadcom chipset not being supported outdated if not how can I configure them to work? because I've tried plugging in directly and it hasn't worked.
3) How can i get programs to work that require root access to run?

Thanks,
Mat