Backtrack/Whax & Wireless Card

I'm farting around with whax and backtrak(2) live cds wanting to get this kismet program to work, they both seem to be giving me a hard time not picking up my wireless card. It's a linksys pci (wmpg54). Now the thing is I got the card to work with windows (cygwin) versions of airsnort and airodump-ng using a windows broadcom driver which works just peachy to set the card in monitor mode under windows. Some sites have the card listed under the ralink set rather than broadcom but I haven't tested radrivers on windows.

iwconfig and ifconfig don't seem to show much, just 3 devices: sit0, eth0, and lo all with no wireless extensions and unable to change modes or autodetect any interfaces. I do have several linux drivers including broadcomm, ralink, and atheros (in airodump cygwin I have to set it to ath) on a CD and I'm able to get the tar files onto the whax desktop but unsure how to "make a file" compile or install them, or if doing so would solve the problem.

I are a linux newb but can pick up quickly if anyone can point me in the right direction it would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.