So heres the situation. I am completly new to linux and do not know anything about it and iv spent the last 4 hours trying to figure this out with no success. I have Mandriva Linux 2007 spring on an old tower machine it does not have an ethernet card but i have a dlink wua-2340 that i would like to try to use on it i guess that im going to need ndiswrapper but i dont know what this is or how to use it if anyone out there knows a tutorial that is newbie freindly i would appreciate it ill keep trying to find one but anyhelp that can be offered would help alot thanx

Have you plugged this usb adaptor in and booted up the machine? Does it get detected but not setup? What have you tried? The ndiswrapper is available for install via your package manager. Alt & F2 type mcc then enter your root password click on look at installable software and install packages now type ndis in the seach box and voila. To find out what the ndiswrapper is and what it does just type ndiswrapper in google.

hey guys sorry to leave you hanging like that when you were trying to help me out with my problem but i had a hectic couple of weeks there. it has switched up some in the past 2 weeks but basicaly its the same problem i am trying to use the same adapter except in my laptop which is a dell inspiron e1705. it crashed with windows and everytime i tried to reinstall it would crash again so i decided im just done with windows in general. as far as the adapter goes i found it in my hardware list it is listed as an unknown usb wlan adapter and i cant do any adjustments to it or anything. The wlan card that came in my computer is a broadcom corporation|Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card. when i try to use it i get an error about (Bcm43xx-firmware) being required but not available. It also says the following component is missing:/lib/firmware/bcm43xx_microcode*.fw
and gives me a url that i can insall it from which is http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ which i tried and got no help. if this was not helpful please let me know and ill do what i can to make it helpful but in the end im still a newbie and have no idea what the hell im doing.