Hi. I'm new to setting up Linux.

I have a dual boot. WinXP/Fedora Core 4.

I've looked at the list of supported cards for ndiswrapper. My card is not listed.
The card is: BroadCom 802.11gg Network Adapter

This is a laptop. Acer Aspire 3600.

Just wondering where I can get this driver and then I should be good following the installation instructions provided by NDISWRAPPER.

First off, Welcome to LQ!

If the card is a Broadcom, then I doubt its model is 802.11gg. That sounds like the 802.11 specifications it usese, not the model. At any rate, you can still identify the card (or more importantly the chipset) from a console. If the card is a PCI card, run lspci and see if the card is listed. If it is a PCMCIA card, run cardctl ident and see what comes back.

By the way, you might want to read through this thread about ndiswrapper problems (and solutions) on Acer laptops.

Ok.

I've tried 'lspci' and 'cardctl ident' in the prompt with root logins. I just get errors along the lines of not finding the commands.
I've also had this same problem with 'modprobe'.

Should I just do a clean install of Fedora?

It depends on how you are loggin into root. If you are using su to become root from a normal user, try su -. The - loads roots paths and would help. However, if you log in as root from a login prompt, then what you're seeing is really not normal. Did you do a full install of Fedora or did you do a partial install? For someone just starting with Linux, a full install is usually the best way to go.

You should also be aware that Fedora and ndiswrapper are not the best mix. Fedora does things to their stock kernels that can make ndiswrapper a royal pain to get working.

I see hangdog.

I was only using 'su'
I didn't know 'su -' did such things, I'll try that.

Also, what would be the alternative to ndiswrapper for Fedora?

Edit1: Alright, I used 'lspci' and got a listing. If you're interested, the parts I think mattered are listed below. Specifically, it is an 'Unknown Device' for Network Controller. Could this be my problem with not getting wireless up and running?

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 04)
05:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
05:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 4318 (rev 02)
05:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02)

The good news is that the Broadcom 4318 is definitely supported by ndiswrapper. From what I can tell on the ndiswrapper wiki, Acer distributes drivers for their wireless cards, so you may be able to download somthing appropriate there.

The problem for Fedora users is that there really isn't an alternative to ndiswrapper (well, there is linuxant, but that is going to suffer from the same problems). The root of the problem is that Fedora has been compiling kernels with 4K stacks, and unfortunately many Windows drivers won't work in a space that limited. Some do however, so the easiest thing to do once you've found appropriate Windows drivers, is to just go ahead and try. If it works, great. If not, you either have to compile your own kernel or you need to use one made by someone else that doesn't have the 4K stack restrictions. The kernels from the linux-ntfs project are suitable.

I keep hearing about this 4 stack situation with FC 4.
As an alternative, which distros would you recommend that work well with ndiswrapper?

From what I can tell, Fedora is really the only distro that actually compilies kernels with the 4K stack limit. You'll see the error message with most distros when you compile against some of the latest kernel versions, but that is because the configuration setting has been moved in the kernel config file and I don't think ndiswrapper has caught up with the change yet. So pretty much any distro will work with ndiswrapper. Some distro's offer a pre-compiled version of ndiswrapper (Mandriva is one example) but given how easy it is to compile ndiswrapper, I wouldn't use this as a major deciding factor. I've installed Ubuntu on computers for a couple of friends and they generally like it (although Ubuntu has a very odd way of handling root's tasks). Mandriva or Suse would also be decent choices. Of course if you want to get some real dirt under your fingernails, nothing beats Slackware.