Problems with Acer wireless button on Aspire 5024 (turion64) and sid 64bit

[Michelasso <qzerty@gmail.com>]

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
successfully installed it, and I can modprobe ndiswrapper after
loading the
windows drivers, 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.conf
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 the 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 was 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.