Yeah, that is certainly the one I would go with.

One thing to keep in mind is that the wireless infrastructure in the kernel is undergoing some significant changes. The wireless stack is moving from SoftMAC to mac80211, which was contributed by Devicescape. This change doesn't affect ndiswrapper since it doesn't use either Softmac or mac80211, but it does affect native Linux drivers if you ever choose to go that route.

By the way, can I ask why you chose FC7? If wireless is an important issue for you an different distro may serve your needs and be less of a wireless problem. I usually don't suggest people change distros, but Fedora has a long history of wireless support problems.

How Work????????

Um, you might want to rephrase your question because I certainly don't understand what you're asking for.

Well a friend gave me a copy of Fedoa Core 3 a couple of years ago and I played around with it a bit but never really got into it. More recently, Windows really pissed me off and so I decided to try again. I went and bought a Fedora book that came with a FC1 cd and played around with that and decided to get the latest greatest release...

I guess I just defaulted to the distro that I had a little history with instead of really doing research on which would be the best to start out with...

I do need wireless capability to get my internet access, and there is no getting around that. I think I may have to throw in the towel on this one.... I enjoy fiddling and tinkering with things to see how they work, but at the end of the day I need my computer to be functional, period.

In which case, before you throw in the towel, may I suggest you try one of the *buntus. I've installed them on a few computers for new Linux users and they've had good success with it. As far as wireless goes, they have greatly reduced nonsense compared to FC.

Well, I am not going back to Microsoft, regardless. I should have been more clear because I meant giving up on F7, not linux....

I think I will check into the ubuntu family, from what I have read they are more newbie-friendly and compatible with wireless. Thanks for your help!

I have seen many Broadcomm not work with the old bcm43xx module from the kernel and now have not spent time with b43-fwcutter but check their site for any info.
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

Now the first thing you should do is disable any security on the router. No WEP, WPA, WPA2, Ip and Mac filtering. Then turn on dhcp if not. You want to make the connection as simply as possible. Once you can do that then enable security and rsolve any issues with that. No sense trying to resolve WEP when the connection would never work in the first place.

Now my experience is use ndiswrapper and the windows inf driver. Note: If the system is 64bit you need the 64bit inf driver. If 32bit then 32 bit driver.

Now the new Fedora 8 to use ndiswrapper requires blacklisting a series of modules that b43 loads on boot. Youe need to add these lines to /etc/modprobe.conf to blacklist the old bcm43xx and new b43 stuff.

Actually follow the details in post #64.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...810#post893810

I would add blacklist bcm43xx to it to make sure the old one is not loaded as well.

Now there are a couple of ways to install ndiswrapper. You can use yum to install and have it install ndiswrapper and the kmod portion that matches the kernel version you are running.
If you do source install then you need kernel-devel rpm installed that matches the kernel you are running. Then follow the install docs for ndiswrapper from their site. One thing that may need to be done is run the command ' depmod -a ' after installing ndiswrapper to update system.map file.

Now ndiswrapper module is built to the kernel you are running. If you change kernels you need to get the matching kmod or recompile the module for the new kernel.

What i found best is install the kernel-devel when you install the new kernel. Then have dkms install. This app recompiles kernels if a new kernel is booted. You need to install the ndiswrapper with dkms. I currently have this rpm installed. dkms-ndiswrapper-1.48-1.el5.rf. There are many for Fedora version distros as well.

Brian