DSL Tips and Tricks :: Trick to loading wireless card (Dell 1350)

After copying BCMWL5.inf and BCMWL5.sys files to your hard drive,  enter the path in NDISWRAPPER (DSLpanel) along with SID, etc. Make sure your hard disk is mounted first before pushing "OK" (note: you will not have another shot at it if you forget; it just won't connect without rebooting).

After successfully connecting, you'll gleefully want to respond "yes" when asked if you got the wireless card working (when shutting down).  This will insure that it won't work again, because the path to your unmounted hard drive will attempt to  load drivers when rebooting, causing a lot of error messages.  In addition, there's no way to get it to connect again by reconfiguring as before without rebooting using "NORESORE" (push F2 when booting, and enter "DSL NORESTORE) .  The trick here is to comment out (place an " # " before the line...or just erase the damn thing) the path listed in opt/bootlocal.sh, "opt/myndis.sh" . This will stop the computer from attempting to load the path to your unmounted hard drive on startup (which doesn't make a lot of sense anyway, does it...).

Of course, this means you have to run NDISWRAPPER every time you boot up to get the card working (which isn't so gleeful after the third or fourth time). Changing the name of the driver to "netcard" allows you to use the default driver name listed when you run NDISWRAPPER from DSLpanel.  (Note, since windows XP doesn't use FAT, the windows directory doesn't show up, so I copied the drivers to the hardrive using EMELfm, and backspace out "/windows" in the default path in NDISWRAPPER (not overly ungleeful; it's trying to find phrases that match BCMWL5 that get tiresome...I won't post a few I came up with).  

Don't forget to reboot with DSL NORESTORE after screwing up your files.
You don't get a second chance to connect with NDISWRAPPER after any errors, and the little "beep" that goes off with "NO CONNECTION" goes straight to the heart; that can't be very healthy.  

These basic comments are intended for the newby's like myself, with about 2 days of experience.