I have a Linksys WMP54G PCI wireless adaptor in a desktop system that I am going to try to get working under FC4. I currently have it working under Ubuntu 5.10 on the same box (Ubuntu includes the driver for it in their distribution, and it worked pretty much out of the box there, with just minor tweaking). In the past, I have had it working with ndiswrapper under an earlier version of Ubuntu.

It looks like there are two viable approaches:
1. ndiswrapper + the windows drivers files from the CD
2. the open source driver package from the rt2x00 project at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/

Any opinions or experiences on which of the above might be either easier or might result in a more stable network connection? Any thoughts before I dive into this would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

I think you have another option which is probably best for Fedora ... Check out the Livna repos and get their binary rpms ... My recommendation: Under no circumstances should you use ndiswrappers for this very fine chipset.

rickh,

Thanks for the pointer to Livna. I'm not on the FC4 box -- it's at home, I'm at work -- what packages should I be looking for after I configure yum to look at Livna?

Go with ndiswrapper. I have used the exact same wireless card on every fedora distribution since FC1 with ndiswrapper and it has worked perfectly. Also, I believe that the Livna repository has ndiswrapper RPMs that you can use (just match the RPM to your kernel). I have not used that open source driver that you are referring to, but I know that ndiswrapper works great.

Hmmmm...

Clearly we are doing something different than you are, bushidozen...

We pulled down the kernel-module-... and ndiswrapper-... RPMs from the Livna site and installed them. They installed fine once we had the versions that matched each other and the kernel (which is still, at this point, the original kernel from the install CDs). When we tried to use them, however, we got the "invalid module format" error that I have seen discussed in other places, and a warning about the 4K stack kernel, that I have also seen. So we dropped back a step, and uninstalled the RPMs.

Downloaded the ndiswrapper source and compiled it. Again, got the 4K stack kernel warning. At some point in the process of trying to get the driver loaded, we also got a version mismatch warning. In addition, I don't know enough about FC to know what file I need to tweak to get ndiswrapper loaded on book (whatever the equivalent of /etc/modules on Ubuntu might be, I suppose). Sorry I don't have more details here -- it was late and we didn't take good notes. We could manually modprobe ndiswrapper and end up with a wlan0 device, but we were completely unsuccessful in getting it to associate with the WAP.

I think our next step will be to try the rt2x00 drivers and see if we have better luck there, although we are certainly still open to guidance on the ndiswrapper approach if you have any (given that you have had such good luck with them).

Just one last quick follow-up on this one to close it out: we uninstalled all of the ndiswrapper remnants from the system in question, pulled down the current rt2x00 driver, built it, installed it, configured the connection through the Network Settings GUI, and it is working flawlessly so far...