Hey Guys,
I recently repartitioned my hard drive so I could dual boot winxp and FC5. My laptop has an Intel PRO Wireless 2200BG Wireless Card and of course it isnt supported by Fedora, Fedora doesnt come with ndiswrapper either so I downloaded ndiswrapper, wireless tools, the driver, and WPA supplicant (because my network is wpa encrypted) and I attempted to install ndiswrapper. I untarred ndiswrapper then went to the directory and did 'make distclean', it worked fine, then tried to follow it up with 'make' and it gave me an error saying that it cant find the kernel build files in /lib/modules/2.6(etc)-FC5/build, it then said to set the path to the kernel build files with KBUILD=<path> I checked the location /lib/modules/2.6(etc)-FC5/build and it exists, so I tried to set the path again with KBUILD, and again at the 'make' step it failed, so I tried KBUILD=/lib/modules/2.6(etc)-FC5/ to see if it just wanted the location of 'build' however, that didnt work either. Any help would be apprectiated. Thanks.

Install ndiswrapper by yum, using the livna repository.
Check the post http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...24#post2193224.

doesnt yum download packages from internet sources?

...if so, that's why it doesnt work because im trying to make my internet work, that's why i need ndiswrapper. however, if it doesnt, then i just have another problem because it didnt work.

Yes. You have the egg-chicken problem
Can you download theses packages from another computer and after that move the rpm files to the target computer ?
If you can, edit /etc/yum.conf and change keepcache=1. Install the packages by yum. After that, you can find the rpm files at /var/cache/yum.

Better than that: Go directly to http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/5/i386/ and download the 2 files I mentioned above. Even a windows machine will work (I hope), and save the packages in a usb stick or whatever.
Back to your FC5, it just a matter of rpm -Uvh *.rpm.

good luck

Why use ndiswrapper when there's a native driver?

Here's the link to the project page, in addition to the FC-specific link I posted above. http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/

2Gnu, I tried that site, I get everything and when I tried to make, it again gave me the error that it couldn't find the kernel build files, and when I checked the location that it said it looked, the build files were right there. I have no idea why it isnt recognizing them. I hooked up my laptop to an ethernet cable earlier this morning and i updated with yum (yum update) and updated quite a few packages, however when I tried yum install ndiswrapper it said that ndiswrapper was unknown.

marozsas, I just downloaded those packages and I will try installing them, I'll let you knwo what happens.

Oh the Joy...
I downloaded the rpm packages and when I went to start up FC5 it said that / did not mount cleanly and it forced a check and it failed. Apparently when I updated with 'yum update' it updated my kernel and screwed everything up. When I get home I'll run linux rescue but if that doesnt work I think I'll just see how well my laptop flies from my second story window.

alright,
I reinstalled FC5 because i couldnt get it fixed after the kernel upgrade. I then found some old rpms for ndiswrapper that work with the kernel I have. i got ndiswrapper working and now the only problem is, it always days the driver i install is invalid. I have an internal Intel PRO Wireless 2200BG wireless card and I got the driver from one of the sites mentioned above. I installed it with 'ndiswrapper -i inffile.inf' then 'ndiswrapper -l' only to see 'invalid driver!' so i pulled out my linksys wireless notebook adapter with speedboost and got that driver off of linksys.com installed that one with the same results. is there something special I need to be doing in order for the laptop to recognize the wireless card?

I tried marozsas' method:

yum install ndiswrapper

and after some time and similar output as listed above,
it comes up with:

No Match for argument: ndiswrapper
Nothing to do

I tried also update with yum, similar result. What is missing is
the information on how to activate it to use a D-link- DWG-G122.

This is meant to be an encouragement to all the other seekers of truth and thrift
who refuse to buy a decent laptop and instead use the old one under Fedora 5.

It finally seems to work:

FC5 kernel 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5 wireless with ndiswrapper-1.15.
D-Link DWL-G122 vers A2.

I put a note here even though the problems that had to be solved
were so special that there maybe only a single person who benefits from this,
and that might just be me, finding years later this post when I have
to solve a similar problem again.

The story of how to install ndiswrapper is well documented, and
I don't go into this.

First problem was: is the D-link card (usb stick) actually seen
by the PC? For this I needed lsusb but that didn't exist anywhere
on the FC5 system. I read somewhere that it would be part of usbutils.


So I asked the oracle(with a wired connection of course):
> yum install usbutils
which delivered lsusb in /sbin/. (yum really has connections...)

Indeed, the device was visible:
/sbin/lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2001:3704 D-Link Corp. [hex] DWL-G122 802.11g rev. A2

Now, following all the nice descriptions of how to install ndiswrapper
(Note: Do read carefully the installation procedures in INSTALL of ndiswrapper's
source. Here is only a small part ot this), and after putting prisma02.inf and prisma02.sys in the right place and adding it to ndiswrapper (>/usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i prisma02.inf), making the entry in /etc/ndiswrapper by means of /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -m, I could do SOMETHING
with D-link:

I was almost elated when the D-link began to blink. - It is
talking!! It is alive!! .... But no, it didn't connect, the poor thing is
just asking for help ??

So another 20 rounds of checking this checking that, scratching
head about all the crazy stuff that could be specified, like
interrupt numbers and what not: All unnecessary. No programmer would
DO this to anyone.

I finally scrutenized the very files that were dumped by ndiswrapper
in /etc/nsdiswrapper/prisma02. There were four files of the
cryptic format 2001:3701.F.conf, 2001:3703.F.conf, 2001:3704.F.conf
2001:3705.F.conf. Only one had the proper reference to the D-link
stick I have, namely vers. A2. So what was wrong with it?

The MAC address in the files was not set. So I replaced the XX:XX:XX:XX:XX field
with the actual MAC address printed on the device. Then I noticed that
there was a reference to prisma02 but not to .sys or .inf, instead
it says: FWFileName|PRISMA02.arm

However, since there isn't any file .arm in this directory, I figured,
it's got to be .sys. - I think that did it. Changed it to .sys and
my call for mercy to all the 500,000 arch angels on the PIII was finally
heard (this is BTW a reference to Joseph Campbell).

It just blew me away: NetworkManager Applet 0.6.0 immediately found
the connection, and even displays a little signal strength diagram like
on my cell phone.

Now I can go with my way too hot PIII Dell to cafees (but they have to have an electric outlet nearby because my battery is almost dead) and slurp my latte, call people on skype and command others around just like all the other bigshots of the "creative" elite ... Life is great.

rewtedesco....I Salute You