I’m trying to do something similar. Install some wifi drivers, but I need the linux headers installed. To do that I have to do a sh!tload more steps to get my zeroshell as a r/w copy. Which is fine, because I probably would have had to do that anyways, but they should have had the compat-wireless stuff installed already.
I’m trying to load
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ar9170