Well, Wireless under linux is not a piece of cake because the wireless hardware vendors are no piece of cake... many of them dont care about linux unfortunately, and dont even release details about their chips, so that free driver development is next to impossible.

Ndiswrapper tries to use the drivers that were programmed for mswindows - emulating a kind of mswindows environment for them. As You can imagine, this is not that easy and because of the lack of documentation of windows drivers or windows itself, problematic.
(see more on http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/)

I have an IBM Thinkpad T40 running with an Broadcom BCM4306 Mini-PCI in it, on Knoppix 5.1.1. It is not 100% bug free, but it's working now (i use ndiswrapper). Here are some additional tips that might help You:

1) Before loading ndiswrapper kernel module, try removing another kernel module named bcm43xx. You can do this by typing: "rmmod bcm43xx".

2) Instead of using ndiswrapper, You could give another driver-project a try. (read more on http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/) I wasn't lucky with this one, but maybe You are. (comment: This one is the kernelmodule i mentioned in 1). But You need the firmware of Your card, because the driver developers aren't allowed to redistribute them... - read more on the weblink!)



Unfortunately, yes, this is quite confusing stuff to newbies (i am also no pro...) - but again: This is no problem caused by linux itself, but a problem caused by ignorant hardware vendors. And this is a problem especially for wlan devices - i dont know why this is. Most hardware usually just works out-of-the-box. (Ever needed to install drivers for chipset/mouse/keyboard/ide/scsi/dsl/vga/cable-lan/soundcard/floppy/hdd/cdrom/dvd/burners/monitors/whatever in Knoppix? I guess not... )

Greetings