Wireless networking setup

[Paul Hendrick]

Hi,
I'm trying to set up a wireless network, but i can't even set the
desktop machine to be an access point(if thats what i need to do! :)
The way I understand it, I'll have my desktop, wired to my router...so

[internet]<-->(router)--wire--(Desktop1)<---wireless--->Desktop2.

So how do I get desktop1 to send a signal? I've used the network-admin
tool to add the wlan device, but it WILL NOT enable. and (even after
restarting the network service), the output of iwconfig still shows
this:
Code:
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed 

when my essid is set to local_wlan, and i WANT the mode to be ad-hoc.

This is getting stupid now! ndiswrapper -l shows 
Code:
bcmwl5  driver present, hardware present

the network-admin tool hangs for ~30 seconds when trying to add the 
device, so obviously something isn't going right?


any ideas?

thanks for reading.
paul.