Installing WMP 54G ver 4.1 on 4.0r3

I just completed an install of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r3 (ETCH) on my desktop. The installation failed to recognize my linksys WMP54G ver 4.1 wireless card. I tried ndiswrapper with the drivers that came with the wireless card, but it failed and the list of installed drivers shows:

rt61 invalid driver!

So I started researching this problem, but there are so many sources of information and some of them appear to conflict or don't specify which hardware or kernel version they have, others date back to 2002 or earlier. As far as I can tell, the WMP54G ver 4.1 drivers do not work with ndiswrapper, but could not confirm if there was a workaround to this.

I found a resource which walks me through locating the source, building and installing compatible drivers. The steps I have gone through so far are:

# lspci
00:12.0 Network Controller RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI

So I went to the RALink site and downloaded what appears to be the appropriate source for the driver:

2007_1210_RT61_Linux_STA_v1.1.2.0.tar.bz2

Which I dumped on my desktop and extracted the files.

My kernel version is 2.6.18-6-686

So per the walkthrough (which agreed with the driver source README) I...

# cd 2007_1210_RT61_Linux_STA_v1.1.2.0/Module
# cp Makefile.6 Makefile
# make
which failed with:
make *** /lib/modules/2.6.18-6-686/build No such file or directory. Stop.

** So I scratched my head; read up on Linux kernels for an hour or so; figured out that perhaps build = Linux source??; installed as many linux kernel source-related and dependent files as I could find in the Package Manager; still not sure if if I'm on the right track, but know how to kill partitions and reinstall if I really mess up this test system.

So I created a link to the kernel source

# cd /lib/modules/2.6.18-6-686
# ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.18 build
# cd ~me/Desktop/2007_1210_RT61_Linux_STA_v1.1.2.0/Module
# make
***
10 pages of errors and warnings!!!!
***

So I obviously forgot to install or configure something, or my build reference was incorrect, but what could the problem be?

The last 5 or so errors/warnings are:
"LINUX_VERSION_CODE" is not defined
"RMTP_EMBEDDED" is not defined
'struct pci_dev' has no member named 'resource'
'too many arguments to function '__release_region'
"BIG_ENDIAN" is not defined

So, where do I go from here? Trace through the make dependents and see what's missing? Read all the .h files for missing references?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.
KRB

Edit: I captured the warning messages and realized that I had to configure and make the kernel for the driver build process to complete. It completed, but it had a warning message about symbolic links to the drivers.. the rt61.ko file was built, so I copied it to the kernel's wireless driver folder... but modprobe rt61 does not locate the driver. So, now I'm stumped.