Switched from Fedora to Ubuntu due to USB WLAN device

I’ve an old desktop PC to with Fedora Core 7 installed and wanted to connect a Netgear WG111v3 to it. Googling (too superficial googling, as I know now …) brought up a number of successful reports of how to install that device on Linux so I assumed it would work on Fedora as well.

There is no native driver, so I used the ndiswrapper kernel module with the Windows driver. However, the computer froze everytime the device was activated. There are a number of posts on the issue (e.g. [1], [2]) but it seems there is no other solution than building a kernel without the 4K stack option limitation the Fedora kernel use by default.

So before building a new kernel I updated to Fedora Core 10, which did not change anything. Building the kernel following the Fedora how to went well, but X server did not start any more …

As I’d found a number of posts on getting WG111v3 running on Ubuntu I gave it a try and booted the live CD – and WG111v3 (as well as my other hardware) worked right out of the box!