Problems with wireless button on Acer Apire 5024 (turion)

[Michelasso]

Hello everybody,
I am trying to make the wireless card of my new Acer notebook (Aspire
5024, Turion-64 based).
The wireless card is a Broadcom one; here's what lspci -v says

----------
0000:06:05.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device
4318 (rev 02)
Subsystem: AMBIT Microsystem Corp.: Unknown device 0311
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
Memory at c0204000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
----------

Unfortunately there are no linux native drivers for this card, so I am
forced to use the winxp 64bit ones through ndiswrapper; I have
succesfully installed it, and I can modprobe ndiswrapper after loading
the windows direvers, getting:

----------
Aug 10 18:39:14 aquila kernel: ndiswrapper: using irq 10
Aug 10 18:39:14 aquila kernel: wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device
00:0e:9b:b9:7b:6c using driver bcmwl5, configuration file 14E4:4318.5.co
nf
Aug 10 18:39:14 aquila kernel: wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP,
WPA with TKIP, WPA with AES/CCMP
----------

So the card seems to be recognized; however when I try to set the essid
with iwconfig I get no results; the output of iwconfig is always:

----------
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point:
00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-10 dBm Noise level:-256
dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
----------

It seems that radio is turned off, and this seems to be caused by the
fact that to turn radio on in windows I have to press a special
button on the front of the laptop that seems to be working only under
windows because of some software issues (it is not a simple hardware
button). When I press it under linux I get:

----------
Aug 10 20:42:58 aquila kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated
set 2, code 0xd6 on isa0060/serio0).
Aug 10 20:42:58 aquila kernel: atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e056 <keycode>'
to make it known.
Aug 10 20:42:58 aquila kernel: atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated
set 2, code 0xd6 on isa0060/serio0).
Aug 10 20:42:58 aquila kernel: atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e056 <keycode>'
to make it known.
----------

Now there is a project called acerhk
(http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~tauber/acerhk/) to make the special
buttons on Acer laptops to
work with linux, but unfortunately this doesn't work in pure 64bit linux
(as the one I am running).

I haven't found anything else on the web after some hours of research,
so I try to ask here for some suggestions.

Bye.