I am using Fedora Core 3 on an HP ZE4200 laptop. I get no errors on boot up or when i do an ifup wlan0 command, but when I enter iwconfig, it doesn't list wlan0 as a wireless device. I think this is my problem. How do I get iwconfig to recognize the card. I'm pretty sure everything is installed correctly. Here's a sum up of what I did:

1. Updated to kernel version 2.6.10-1.770.fc3.stk16.i586
2. Installed ndiswrapper
3. installed linksys driver into ndiswrapper
4. created ifcfg-wlan0 file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts:

DEVICE=wlan0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
and ESSID, KEY, etc.

5. edited the following:
/etc/init.d/pcmcia #chkconfig changed to 2345 09 96
/etc/init.d/network #chkconfig changed to 2345 22 96
/etc/init.d/nfslock #chkconfig changed to 345 23 86

6. added ndiswrapper module to kernlel
7. ndiswrapper -m command impeded startup of card, so I deleted it.



I configured ndiswrapper 1.0 for using the linksys 2.02 drivers available on linksys' website. There is no difference between this version and the 1.31 version I was using before.

You shouldn't need to run ndiswrapper -m at every boot. I'm pretty sure all it does is modify your modprobe.conf file (for 2.6.x kernels) or modules.conf (for 2.4.x kernels) to include the line alias wlan0 ndiswrapper. Check the appropriate file and make sure that the line is there.

Now, with that said, the geniuses at RedHat seem to have engineered at least some of their wireless tools to not recognize wlan as a legit name for a card. So instead of wlan0 (which is what ndiswrapper uses by default), you may need to change that line in the .conf file to use eth1 or something similar.