Wireless Help Please

I'm new to linux, from Windows. I connect to the internet fine in XP, but can't get my linux to connect. It finds my network card, but it never shows a connection available. I've entered the ip address of my router and the subnet mask, etc manually, but it still doesn't work. I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to do in order to get it to work, in the past, when I would mess around with other linux distros, I would just happen to stumble upon getting it to work, not knowing what I really did to fix it. I have a Dell 1501 laptop, with a Dell wireless network card. All help would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.

if the card is recognised, go to yast - network devices - network cards & configure there. did you install the drivers ? if, as i suspect, the wireless device uses the broadcom chip-set, there are 2 ways of installing it.

1 ) using ndiswrapper & andrew18's guide found here http://www.andrewd18.com/ndiswrapper/

2 ) using fw-cutter to install the firmware. i posted the method somewhere on the forum,just do a search with my handle.

if you are unsure of the driver,post the output of

lspci -v

& we will see what we can do

Andy