Disclaimer: I am a complete and utter newbie to Linux (I've used it for a few hours so far and learned a few of the basic terminal commands a few years back. Nothing else.)

I'm trying to get a USB wireless card to work on Linux and I think I've made a decent amount of progress so far, but now I'm completely stuck and would greatly appreciate any help. Here's my situation:
I'm running Fedora Core 5 and the device is an IOGear USB 2.0 Wireles-G Adapter (ID number 124a:4023).
I downloaded ndiswrapper (1.19) as well as the recommended driver off the list on ndiswrapper wiki (awlgtnic).
I ran through the ndiswrapper procedure and ndiswrapper -l gives a message saying "awlgtnic driver installed, hardware present".
modprobe doesn't give any errors.
lsusb detects the card.
dmesg |grep ndiswrapper gives messages saying:

ndiswrapper version 1.19 loaded (preempt=no, smp=no)
usbcore: registered new driver ndiswrapper

ifup wlan0 says "ndiswrapper device wlan0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization"
ifconfig wlan0 up says "wlan0: unknown interface: No such device"
But /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts has a file called ifcfg-wlan0.

It seems like wlan0 isn't being associated with the card, but I have no idea how to fix that..or if that's even the problem. Any suggestions?

Two mistakes. #1 you need to tell us the model number. I'm making an educated guess that it's a GWU513.

#2 mistake which is really very good news, indeed, (assuming I have the model number right) is that this card has a Prism 54 chipset ... 100% Linux compatible with native drivers. You should not be messing around with ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper is totally overused, and one of the worst things that has happened to Linux.

FC5 should support this card out of the box, but it's hard to say what you may have done to it by installing ndiswrapper modules. Hopefully, you can get that module deleted, and ndiswrapper completely uninstalled, then go to your Networking GUI and turn the card on.

LOL @ myself for forgetting to post the model number... yeah it's GWU513 with a Prism54 chipset.
However, it wasn't working out of the box (i.e. before I installed ndiswrapper), and all the sources I consulted said it's not natively supported by linux and that I should use ndiswrapper.
No offense, but I don't want to go about uninstalling ndiswrapper unless I can be absolutely, 100% certain that ndiswrapper is not the way to go.. is there any way I can check this for myself?

Edit: Should I use the islsm driver instead of ndiswrapper? Apparently the guy working on this before me tried islsm but didn't get it to work.

Without more study than I am prepared to do, I can't be positive it should work out of the box. I am positive that there is a working native driver (http://prism54.org/newdrivers.html).

I think there must be some MS plot to convince people that they can't use Linux unless they have conversion software to use MS programs. At any rate, a lot of people seem to believe that.

Ok, I uninstalled ndiswrapper and the windows driver and am installing the Prism54 (islsm) driver off their site, but I get some errors:

/root/Desktop/tla-1.3.4/src/=build/prism54-project/src/kernel/islusb_init.c:385: error: unknown field ‘owner’ specified in initializer
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
/root/Desktop/tla-1.3.4/src/=build/prism54-project/src/kernel/islusb_init.c:385: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
make[3]: *** [/root/Desktop/tla-1.3.4/src/=build/prism54-project/src/kernel/islu sb_init.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [_module_/root/Desktop/tla-1.3.4/src/=build/prism54-project/src/ker nel] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.15-1.2054_FC5-i586'
make[1]: *** [modules] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/Desktop/tla-1.3.4/src/=build/prism54-project/s rc/kernel'
make: *** [islsm] Error 2

Does this mean anything to anyone, and can anyone help me figure out what's going on?
Thanks.