I have a Compaq Presario R4000 with the built-in Broadcom BCM4306 wireless network adapter. When this machine runs Windows XP, it connects to the network with no problems. However, I recently installed Fedora 8 on the system, and now I can't get it to connect.

From what I've been able to dig up, the driver for this card is now included in the kernel, so ndiswrapper is no longer required. Is this true? I did extract the firmware from the Windows drivers, and the kernel does see the card, but I can't get anything through the WAP (Linksys WAP11). iwconfig says that it is connected (shows the correct MAC address for the access point), but the WAP "Associated Stations" list doesn't show it.

On the other hand, if I install a Linksys WPC11 adapter in the system, that card will come up and connect just fine.

Do I have any chance of getting the built-in wireless to work (maybe with ndiswrapper instead of the included driver?) or should I just use a Linksys card?

Thanks for any suggestions.

bcm43xx module should work fine. Check whether the firmware has been extracted or not to /lib/firmware. There should be files starting with bcm43xx in that directory. Check dmesg to see if the module is detecting the card and the status of the wireless switch or not.
$dmesg|grep bcm

And you can use ndiswrapper too. Use Windows Xp drivers and it should work perfectly. I prefer the Linux drivers because I can then change the mode of the card from Managed to monitor. This in turn allows me to use programs like aircrack-ng and kismet easily.