During installation of the ndiswrapper (note; 32-bit only!),I found the following:

Sometimes, wireless is disabled during start, so trying wifi will not work.

To enable the wirelessdo the following as root (sudo su -):

. /usr/share/acpi-support/state-funcs

setLEDAsusWireless 1 

This saves a lot of time figuring out why you cannot get wireless to work under (Ubuntu) linux...