For the configuration of the wireless adapter in the laptop I use ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper uses the drivers provided by windows, in my case the bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys files.
Detailed installation instructions are given in this thread. As root, what you have to do is as follows:
# install ndiswrapper package apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils # configure ndiswrapper ndiswrapper -i <path to bcmwl5.inf> # install the driver ndiswrapper -m # change the configuration (important!) for conffile in /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5/*.conf; do cat $conffile | sed -e 's/RadioState|1/RadioState|0/' > $conffile done
Then the configuration of your wireless connection can be done with network-admin or via System > Administration > Networking.
In my case the relevant file of /etc/network/interfaces is as follows:
iface wlan0 inet dhcp wireless_keymode open wireless-essid wlan wireless-key open
You may need to adapt this to your configuration. With iwlist wlan0 scan any accesspoints present are listed.
Note: In my case without modification of /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5/.conf* I wasn’t able to connect to the accesspoints.