i should write a howto on getting in a mess with ease.
what might seemed to have happened is that i followed the ndiswrapper howto and blacklisted the bcm43xx module and i read elsewhere that the bcm43xx is native driver and added to rc.modules and stopped using ndiswrapper but bcm43xx was blacklisted already. hmm..

but that's not the only mess i got into...
today when i did a ifconfig -a and saw the wireless interface had changed to wlan0. i hadn't been using GUI tools yet. also i had followed the article on fixing the eth values of lan and wlan, so ethernet NIC _is_ eth0 and the wireless interface is _eth1_ .
//this part is not for hurried readers--> begins
the configuration of interface esp. the values to put in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf is confusing as there are 2 different configurations at college and home (both fixed but both have different gateway addresses) also there are 2 different wlan configurations. no dhcp at home n dhcp at college and i've never had the dhcpcd working correctly yet. besides the university admins tell they w.i..ll register my MAC address of wlan so that i can access the net thru university wifi. gotta ask again.
//this part is not for hurried readers --> ends
the only thing i am confused about is how did the interface name change to wlan0. i had written the wlan MAC elsewhere so i knew that wlan0 was the device. i had done nothing beyond the steps i told you. only CLI stuff. another strange thing was everytime before when i used "ifconfig eth1(which is now wlan0) up" the wifi led on the dell inspiron would glow up, but now even that does not happen. i guess its tired of pretending to show the wifi is working.
