He's using the Sabayon miniEdition (3.0RC2), and on the back of his laptop, the wireless card says "BRCM1016." After some
research I discovered that this is (supposedly) a Dell Truemobile 1370 MiniPCI WLan card. After some
more research I find out that this is a bcm4318 chipset, covered by the bc43xx drivers.
Anyway, the first time he went through the tutorial, he said it worked fine: he could see three networks, including his own, could connect and get to the internet, blah blah blah. Then he said that after a reboot it didn't work, so he re-followed the steps, which also didn't work. I'll try to get him to post something himself by tomorrow, but I've been trying to get those stupid drivers working for a couple of weeks (loads of spyware borked his Windows install a few weeks ago, so I put SuSe 10.1 on there, and when we nailed that install trying to get the wireless working, I had him try Sabayon).