No it is not. Thats is why I am trying to get the wireless to work. I know a lot of packages will probably be updated with a yum update. Unfortunately I cannot really get this PC wired to the net without a lot of trouble. I am thinking of even hooking a crossover cable to my windows PC and hopping off this ones Internet just to get it updated but that will be a last resort as that will require a lot if work.

I miss using YAST. That was great. I dont think i will go with Ubuntu as I dont like the gnome Interface as much as KDE. I am going to try and reinstall FD5 with this time selecting everything in it. I hope that this will solve all my problems. Right now I cannot get any packages to even compile no matter what ones I download. I downloaded a Linux driver for my wireless card from sourceforge and cannot get it to install or compile so i think i might be my install. Hopefully this time the support for my wireless card will be installed. Its frustrating because I can see the airo driver there but when i modprobe it, it says cannot find it. I know the aero 350 card has built in support with FD5 but it isnt working and that is frustrating.

You can choose among versions of Ubuntu and SimplyMEPIS. Both of these are focused for new linux users. However, personally I would recommend SimplyMEPIS. It has all the common software pre-installed but, in Ubuntu, you hav to do a little bit of apt-get to make flash, mp3, videos to work (will take hardly 20 mins).
The new testing version of SimplyMEPIS ie. 6.0 Beta1 is based on Dapper Drake (Ubuntu testing). However, if u need a released version Ubuntu 5.10 or SimplyMEPIS-3.4-3 would be great.

for ndiswrapper

>make && make install

ndiswrapper -i <path to windows driver>
ndiswrapper -m
modprobe ndiswrapper


Some distros like SimplyMepis and Ubuntu come with ndiswrapper already installed, although in Ubuntu you have to install the tools with apt. With those you just have to add the windows driver to ndiswrapper.

Well, you are a bit stuck if you can't access the internet from your system, because yum needs to retrieve packages from the net.

The current OpenSuSE evaluation version (gratis, unlimited) does contain the "usual" proprietary software packages.

(Nevertheless, it's not that hard to subsequently install non-free software. In most cases, you're just required to google and find a how-to, and to paste some commands into the terminal. At least, Ubuntu is well-supported in that way.)

I extracted my ndiswrapper into the tmp directory then opened a terminal window there. However when I use the make command I get a Can't find the kernel build files in lib\modules\2.6.15-1.2054_FC5\Build and it exits.

IS this an indication that my install did not go very well?

What do I do now?