I've installed Fedora C3 on my ibm t30 laptop. The wlan card in the laptop is based on prism 2 chipset. With 'orinoco_pci' driver from the system, the wireless card can associate with AP and communicate with other hosts. But the card cannot scan the channel with 'iwlist'. So I start to try other drivers. I download and install the hostap driver. But I find that even after I do 'modprobe hostap_pci' to load the hostap module, the wireless interface still keep using the 'orinoco_pci' driver.

My question is:
1. How to make a hardware to use a dedicated driver among multiple drivers.
2. Where to check if a module has been compiled into the kernel?

Thanks

1. How to make a hardware to use a dedicated driver among multiple drivers.

You can add module aliases to /etc/modules.conf:

alias eth0 module_name
alias eth1 module_name

If that is what you mean. Just edit /etc/network/interfaces to suit your need, or use some tool that does it for you. Btw. editing /etc/modules.conf directly might not be wise, check your distro documentation.

2. Where to check if a module has been compiled into the kernel?

Do you want to see if some driver is compiled INTO the kernel or if it is available as a MODULE?

You could try "dmesg|less" and check the entries. Also, with kernel 2.6.x you might want to check /proc/config.gz if it exists.

If you want to know which modules are present, you can do (as root):

find /lib/modules/yourkerneldir -name "*.o"
or
find /lib/modules/yourkerneldir -name "*.ko"

It is however usually simpler just to try load a module to see if exists.