Every time I boot, I have to manually modprobe my ndiswrapper module for my wireless card to work. The tutorial I followed to get it installed said to edit the modules.autostart.d file to have the module get loaded at boot. Unfortunately this file doesn't exist in fedora 7. Does anyone know what I need to do to get this file loaded at boot? and while we're at it, how do I get linux to stop loading the default module for my wireless card at each boot. I have to rmmod the current one before I can modprobe the ndiswrapper module. Thanks in advance!

Moracca

add it to rc.local

No, add a ndiswrapper file to /etc/modprobe.d/ thusly:And, at least once, you should do a sudo modprobe ndiswrapper.

Note: Are you sure that ndiswrapper is needed? Fedora 7 automatically installs FOSS drivers for any hardware it finds for which such drives are available. For example, many PCI wireless cards use Brodcom chipsets for some (but not all) of their products (e.g., Linksys), and Fedora will load one of the two bcm43xx divers if lspci shows a Broadcom chipset.

If Fedora has loaded a driver for you, you'll need to remove it (modprobe -r ...) and add the driver to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist before ndiswrapper will work, since, of course, two drivers trying to access the same hardware is seldom a workable situation.

Thank you very much for your help, that worked for me. Yes, I needed ndiswrapper because, as you said, linux was loading one of the broadcom drivers by default, however that was not working for my device. I wasn't able to activate the card when it was using those drivers, only after I rmmod'ed it and loaded the ndiswrapper.

Thanks again -- its frustrating how all the different distributions have different methodologies for this type of thing, so its hard to look online for answers because they vary so much. Glad I have it working tho.

There's a "trick" to getting the bcm43xx drivers to actually work, even if they are "installed" by anaconda: You have to run the bcm43xx_fwcutter program using the Windows inf and sys files as input to extract the propitiatory microcode for the bcm43xx driver to use. (Because the code is "propitiatory," Fedora can not include it in it's distribution.)

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For my laptop, with a Broadcom chipset on the m/b, the ndiswrapper solution works much better. When I last checked, the bcm43xx driver was limited to 11 Mb/sec, and it failed to report correct signal strengths for access points. And I was unable to access my own WPA2-encrypted access point using the bcm43xx_ieee80311 driver. (That name is from memory since I'm using my desktop system with a different drive setup right now.)
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I had everything working perfectly. ndiswrapper would load up at boot, wireless gets activated, no problems. Last night, fedora tells me that there are some 200 package updates that need to be installed, so I figured sure, might as well be up to date. After the next reboot everything went to shit. I now have 2 options in my boot loader menu:
Fedora (2.6.22.1-41.fc7)
Fedora (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7)

when I boot into 2.6.22, I am unable to modprobe ndiswrapper, as it says module not found. I am also unable to modprobe usbcore, same error. Not sure what went haywire but something definitely got screwed up. When i boot into the older kernel everything works perfectly. any suggestions?

I'm assuming you have already done a yum install livna-release to set up the livna repository definitions. If you haven't, do it first.

Did you install the fedorakmod plug-in? Without it updated ndiswrapper releases from livna will not be automatically detected and installed when you do a kernel update. If you haven't, do a yum install yum-fedorakmod. You might want to also consider installing the yum-fastestmirror and yum-skip-broken plugins at the same time.

For now, just do a yum install ndiswrapper-kmod-1.46-1.2.6.22.1_41.fc7