This post is to highlight some issues I had installing the Netgear wg111 wireless card under Fedora Core 4.

First, I would recommend that any new user read through the hardware compatibility lists prior to purchasing. I was given this card by my office, so I can't complain that "Linux is not supported by this manufacturer." and others who post "configuring the wg111 is not trival under Linux."

Kudos to the ndiswrapper development team. Barring a few hiccups noted below, I found their Wiki site to be very useful--and gave me hope that this would be a solvable task
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m....php/Main_Page

Upon compiling the ndiswrapper source, I received a warning about the 4K stack issue that seems to be standard with Fedora 2.6 kernels. But there were links to patches on http://www.linuxant.com

I incorporated the patch, and here was my first hiccup. When I recompiled the ndiswrapper source, I still got a warning "This kernel compiled with CONFIG-4KSTACKS removed" .... well I didn't read the comment completely (note it says they were removed!!), and just assumed that my patch didn't work. I carefully applied the patch, recompiled a vanilla (2.6.14) kernel, and recompiled ndiswrapper -- and of course got that warning again (which I carefully read this time). My fault, but I don't understand why you get a warning when you are compiling the code(ndiswrapper) in a manner to make it work!! i.e you are supposed to have 4K-stacks removed.

I downloaded the netgear windows driver 2.1 from the netgear site, and unzipped the file as described on the wikipedia site. http://kbserver.netgear.com/products/wg111v1.asp

Next, installed the driver per the ndiswrapper - wiki directions. Everything went swimmingly except the command

>ndiswrapper -l

never identifies my USB card as present (only the driver). For that matter the command

>lsusb

was not installed either (I'm not sure what package that comes with in FC4--and perhaps is related to the above problem), but

>less /proc/bus/usb/devices

allowed me to insure that the card was loaded, and after I issued the command

>ndiswrapper -m

>less /proc/bus/usb/devices

also showed that the device had found the ndiswrapper driver.

I now have a configurable card that responds to wlan0. I'm moving to a wireless access point (AP) and will hopefully get connected per the remainder of the wikipedia directions.

-- A few days later --
Well, since you are reading this post, I got the card up and running. But I have to admit it was a little black magic to do so. First, I tried the

>iwlist wlan0 scan
>iwconfig wlan0 essid (or key restricted xxxxx)

I received an warning that "Warning: Driver for device wlan0 has been compiled with version 19 of Wireless Extension, while this program supports up to version 17. Some things may be broken..."

But I looked at the wireless tools site, and they note that after wireless tools 27 this warning is not an issue.
Anyway, I haven't had a problem with the conflict.

Moving on, although I could see the AP using 'iwlist', I was unable to configure the 'essid'
until I restarted the computer (out of frustration...), at which point, it just started working.
There must be some service that needs to be restarted that I was missing. The wiki site states that network configurations vary from distro to distro, and so I hope someone can provide some insight on which daemon needs to be restarted.

The trick (after trying several other things...) I found was to use the command dhclient.

for an unencrypted AP,
>iwconfig wlan0 essid foo-essid
>dhclient wlan0

should bring up the network

for WEP,
>iwconfig wlan0 key restricted xxxxxxxx
>dhclient wlan0

will work. Note if using an ASCII code, type just xxxxx. If using hex, type 0xFFFFFF (i.e. add 0x)

you can check if everything is running by
>iwconfig wlan0
>ifconfig wlan0

to see if the essid is set, and IP address is configured.

At this point, you can start your browser and all should work!!

Good luck.