Ubuntu Networking :: Doesn't Seem To Detect Wireless Connections?

i'm using a dell n5010 recently i installed ubuntu9.10 in my laptop and it doesn't seem to detect wireless connections, so, i googled it and downloaded a driver from broadcom and tried to install it as per the authors instructions and nothing seems to work well, the broadcom drivers are not detected in the additional drivers and when i try to install linux-wlan-ng tarballs it doesn't seem to work even, though i have gcc(i think thats it), so, i installed my windows driver through nsdgtk but it says that it is "unable to see if hardware is present" but, when i click ok on the error the wireless network applet says the hardware is present and when i click the network configuration tool it gives the error message "could not find a network configuration tool" and after configuring my network with network tools in administration it says "no wireless extensions" when i type 'iwconfig' and there is no ip address when i type "ipconfig".