Getting wireless adaptor to work

[Robert]

i have a HP Pavillian zt1130 laptop that was made in 2001 - 02. it has a
intel mobil celeron 1.2 ghz processor with 512 Mb of memory. unfortunately,
it cannot boot DVD's..only CD's. i have been using Mepis 8 on it for a long
time & it served me well. My Linksys Wireless cardbus Card was supported
perfectly. My network was set up with WPA-2 encryption & the wireless
adaptor worked fine with that setup. however the problem is that there
really is not many choices of distributions that come on CDR sized I.S.O's.
so what i did was replaced the hard drive with a blank drive, downloaded the
Debian "Testing" version of the netinstall image & installed it using the
"desktop=xfce" option.

the install started out ok, up until it got to the hardware discovery... at
that point, it stalled. i had to do a hard shutdown with the power button. i
decided to eject the wireless card from the card bus & start again. this
time, the install with smoothly, without a hitch. the problem is now, i
cannot get my wireless card to work. wicd does not list it, however, this
shows up at the bottom of the listings in lspci:

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce
One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4318] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Linksys WPC54G v3 802.11g Wireless-G Notebook Adapter [1737:0048]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
Memory at 24000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge

it appears that there is a kernel driver loaded. however, when i do a
iwconfig, this is what i get:

root@debian:/home/robert# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on

eth0 no wireless extensions.

after further investigation, i found that i was missing the firmware needed
for this card, so i used apt to download & install the firmware-b43-
installer and b43-fwcutter packages.
after the installations, i run the b43-fwcutter with the -l option & found a
link to linuxwireless.org website with more info. i found that on this
debian install that the use of the b43-fwcutter app was not needed. however,
installing the firmware package did not do anything. wireless is still not
working. b.t.w, the chipset in this card is fully supported.
i found a package called "ceni" that was used on other debian based
installations for setting up wireless cards. i downloaded it & installed it
using gdebi-core. after installing it & running it, it found the wireless
card & it also let me scan for my wireless network which it found. i also
was able to enter my wpa-2 passkey. however, it did not display any
addresses for my nameservers in the next field. after i exited the ceni app,
i rebooted. after reboot, i opened wicd & saw that it still did not see my
wireless network.
i run the command "iwconfig" & this time this is what i got:
root@debian:/home/robert# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"linuxuser"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:16:B6:BF:45:B8
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=68/70 Signal level=-42 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:2 Invalid misc:35 Missed beacon:0

then i run the command "iwlist wlan0 scan" & this is what i got:
root@debian:/home/robert# iwlist wlan0 scan
wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:16:B6:BF:45:B8
Channel:6
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Quality=55/70 Signal level=-55 dBm
Encryption key:on
ESSID:"linuxuser"
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
Mode:Master
Extra:tsf=000001013f329819
Extra: Last beacon: 36ms ago
IE: Unknown: 00096C696E757875736572
IE: Unknown: 010882848B962430486C
IE: Unknown: 030106
IE: Unknown: 2A0104
IE: Unknown: 2F0104
IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
IE: Unknown: 32040C121860root@debian:/home/robert#
iwlist wlan0 scan
wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 00:16:B6:BF:45:B8
Channel:6
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Quality=55/70 Signal level=-55 dBm
Encryption key:on
ESSID:"linuxuser"
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
Mode:Master
Extra:tsf=000001013f329819
Extra: Last beacon: 36ms ago
IE: Unknown: 00096C696E757875736572
IE: Unknown: 010882848B962430486C
IE: Unknown: 030106
IE: Unknown: 2A0104
IE: Unknown: 2F0104
IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
IE: Unknown: 32040C121860
IE: Unknown: DD09001018020014000000
IE: WPA Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
Cell 02 - Address: C0:3F:0E:93:DE:F2
Channel:1
Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
Quality=27/70 Signal level=-83 dBm
Encryption key:on
ESSID:"bugeja"
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
Mode:Master
Extra:tsf=0000000612b44b78
Extra: Last beacon: 1792ms ago
IE: Unknown: 0006627567656A61
IE: Unknown: 010882840B162430486C
IE: Unknown: 030101
IE: Unknown: 2A0104
IE: Unknown: 2F0104
IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
IE: Unknown: 32040C121860
IE: Unknown:
DD7F0050F204104A00011010440001021041000100103B00010310470010D294107B4477DE1BFDE3A8511BB
F86F91021000D4E4554474541522C20496E632E102300095747523631347631301024000957475236313476
31301042000538333235381054000800060050F204000110110009574752363134763130100800020084
IE: Unknown: DD090010180202F0050000
IE: WPA Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
IE: Unknown:
DD180050F2020101800003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00

also, after running the ceni app, i noticed that the "link" led on the
adaptor was flashing on & off. before running ceni, it did not illuminate at
all. can someone tell me what i am missing or what i need to do.
wicd still does not see a wireless network