Well, I am lucky enough to have two of the exact same laptops where I work so I bought a 2 litter of Diet Mt. Dew and totally formatted and installed one of them from scratch. Here is how I set it up regarding the wireless network card.
I installed the ndiswrapper (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper/) and followed its instructions. NOTE: I did not totally follow it's instructions on the 'Automate' section. That screwed me up last time.
This step-by-step walk through is for Fedora CORE 1.0 using a Dell Inspiron 1100 with the PCMCIA Dell TrueMobile 1300 (BroadCom BCM94306) 802.11b/g wireless network card. I have an integrated 10/100 that is eth0 so the wlan card is eth1. I had a lot of trouble getting this stupid thing to work but here are the steps that finally got the results I wanted.
I burned the driver to a CD and then untared it and here are the commands I issued (linuxquestions.org's forum messed some of this up):
tar zxvf ndiswrapper.tar.gz
cd ndiswrapper
make
insmod driver/ndiswrapper.o
cd utils
make
cp loaddriver /sbin/.
lspci
lspci -n (to find my vendor [14e4] and device [4320] numbers as the README explains)
mount /mnt/cdrom ( I placed the Dell TrueMobile Driver disk in the cdrom first)
cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/bcmwl5.* .
loaddriver 14e4 4320 bcmwl5.sys bcmwl5.inf (my wlan cards power led turned on)
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
# Broadcom Corporation|BCM94306 802.11g
# These settings are from the way I configured my wireless router
DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Wireless
ESSID=linksys
KEY=5136AS7F81
CHANNEL=1
GATEWAY=192.168.2.1
iwconfig (look for your wlan card)
iwconfig eth1 mode Managed
iwconfig eth1 key 5136AS7F81
iwconifg eth1 essid linksys
ifup eth1 (I got an error but then it said '... done' and I knew)
ifconfig (make sure it is in the list)
ping 192.168.2.1 (when this worked I instantly went to google.com to make sure that it was working and Viola! it was)
Now we still need to make it work after we reboot.
I currently do this by issuing the following in /etc/rc.d/rc.local
ifdown eth1
rmmod ndiswrapper
insmod /root/ndiswrapper/driver/ndiswrapper.o
loaddriver 14e4 4320 /root/bcmwl5.sys /root/bcmwl5.inf
ifup eth1
NOTE: Kudzu ran the first time I rebooted and tried to reconfigure my eth0 as eth1 and that really screwed me up. Do not let the "hardware wizard" get you! Click 'Do Nothing' and then disable it from starting again (Hat->System Settings->Server Settings->Services).
I tried to copy the ndiswrapper.o into the /libs/modules/2.4Something directory and issuing depmod -a but that caused errors. I am not sure why and I have decided that it is really not that important. It is 2:40am and I beat the laptop! It only took me 9 hours.