I'll try and make this as concise as possible. Yesterday I installed Fedora Redhat Core 2, and this is my first time ever touching a linux machine. On my machine I have an ethernet pci card and a linksys wmp54g v4 wireless-g card. I use only the wireless card for internet.

I tried installing the drivers for my card with ndsiwrapper. I looked on their page of cards and they list mine, however when I downloaded the file it was an exe, and when I extracted it I didn't see any inf or sys files or anything like that...just dlls mainly. I saw somewhere else something about using the drivers that shipped w/ the card so I decided to try that instead. I went through everything in the instructions from ndsiwrapper and all seemed to go well. From the output it appeared that it was communicating with my card and even that my card was picking up the signal from my router, etc...

The only part that I didn't understand in the instructions was when it said "now setup the network parameters for the interface wlan0." It listed a couple of commands, and I tried the first one 'ifconfig wlan0 up'. This crashed (froze) my system. So I restarted and went into my network settings gui thing. it listed my regular ethernet card in there as well as the wireless/ndsiwrapper one. So I unchecked the box next to my regular one, checked the box on the wireless on and tried switching it from 'inactive' to 'active'. When I did this the machine crashed (froze). So I restarted it and when back into the network setup, but this time instead of switching it to active I set it to make it active when linux starts up, and then rebooted my machine. Now when it starts up it freezes when it gets to the loading network part. When I click on show details, it looks like it gets into some kind of infinite loop...all sorts of stuff is wizzing by real fast, but it appears to be the same stuff.

So my questions are:

1) How can I boot up without making it active automatically (so that I can get in to disable it).....sorry to use a windows term, but is there an equivalent of safe mode or something where I can at least get in......or could I boot into a shell and then type a command to prevent it from being active at startup?

2) Once I can get it to boot....any suggestions on getting the card to work? Like I said....everything appeared to be working fine and all....all the way up until I tried to make it active....I'm guessing that driver just won't work? The ndiswrapper wiki recommended a driver from RaLink, but like I said...I couldn't seem to find any inf files in it.....any suggestions?

There is a Linux equivalent of Windows safe mode, it is called single mode. To boot up that way, when you get to your GRUB screen, you need to enter the words linux single at the GRUB prompt (or it might be linux 1, I don't remember which one GRUB uses). That should by-pass most of the machine set-up and let you edit your configuration.

As for the crashes, there have been a number of reports of later versions of ndiswrapper having serious trouble with Fedora. You may want to try backtracking to version 0.7 and see if that works.