Acer Aspire WLAN issues.

Hi all,

Hopefully someone out there will be able to give me a hand. I have dual
boot windows XP/linux machine. It is an acer aspire 5002 LMi and it has a
internal broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN. Now my issue is this, the wireless works
all well and good when I boot up windows but no such luck with linux. So I
downloaded the driverloader and configured it with the proper windows
driver(I know these are the correct drivers as they are the exact same as
those recommended on the acer website). The linuxant support people
confirmed this when I sent them the diagnostic report :

----------
DriverLoader is correctly installed and you are using the correct
Windows driver. The licensing information is also correctly entered.
However, we don't see any access points in the output of the 'iwlist
scanning' command. As long as you are unable to see an access point in
the output of the previous command, you will not be able to associate
(connect) with your access point.
---------

Now I don't have a wireless network at home and I am trying to use my
laptop to connect to the networks at school. I know the essid's of all
these networks and I try to set them via the iwconfig command. However I
am still not allowed to connect(no IP address found) when I run my network
configurator.

The one difference I have noticed between running under windows and linux
is that the LED indicating that the wireless card is operating. Now the
support team said that sometimes you have to press a hotkey to turn it on.
I've tried reading the manual(according to windows my WLAN is always on)
for a specific hotkey reference but not such luck. Secondly, I went to

http://rfswitch.sourceforge.net/?page=laptop_matrix

and it makes no reference to the aspire 5000 series (and the acerhk
program is not applicable to this laptop).

So my question would be this, how the heck am I suppose to turn my WLAN on
in linux when there doesn't appear to be any button or a particular
hotkey/key combination that I've seen.

Thank you

Jeff