Need help with ndiswrapper

[Erik Hemdal]

Patrick, I just went down this road....
> 
> Hi,
> I'm new to Linux and need a little help installing ndiswrapper.  I've
> installed FC4 on my desktop and downloaded updates with 
> Up2date.  I have
> been unable to get my linksys WMP54Gv.4 wireless card 
> recognized by the
> network wizard.  I have downloaded ndiswrapper in order to install the
> windows xp driver for the card, but am having trouble 
> following all the
> install instructions on the ndiswrapper
> website-http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php
> /Installation
> 
> I used the 
> ln -s /usr/src/linux-<kernel-version> 
> /lib/modules/VERSION/build command
> to build a link to the source, inserting '2.6.11-1.1396_FC4' as the
> version.  

I found that this was already done.  You need the proper headers for your
kernel, and the proper package to install is kernel-devel-<kernel-version>.

> The next step went o.k.-'make distclean' in the ndiswrapper-1.2

I'm not surprised because that step cleans up from any previous builds.

> directory, but the 'make' command produced a 'no link' error.  Sure
> enough, upon clicking the /lib/modules/2.6.11-1.1369_FC4/build and
> source files it said there was no link.
> How do I find out if I have the source.  If not, how do I get it? 
> What is 'the source'. Why wouldn't it have been installed with FC4?

Try 'yum install kernel-devel' to set this up.  You might not get this
source because you don't strictly need it until you start doing, well, just
what you are trying to do. It might or might not be installed depending on
the kind of installation you did for FC4.  The various HOWTO's  you might
find can easily mislead you because the name of the correct package for the
kernel source has changed from time to time.  An older HOWTO might have you
looking for the wrong source package.

You will need the correct Windows driver for ndiswrapper to use, it will be
a .INF file.  There is a list of known-good drivers on the ndiswrapper
Installation wiki.  Before you begin building, make sure you have the
correct driver at hand, say on a USB disk.  You need this because after
building ndiswrapper, you still need to load the Windows driver before
things will work.  The driver I needed came packaged in a Windows EXE -- no
way to extract the files under Fedora!

I found that I had to follow the steps for iwconfig to set up my card and
had to use dhclient to get my IP address and DNS settings.

You might find it convenient to print the installation instructions from the
wiki before you get started as well.  

Good luck.  Erik