fedora 8 wireless hardware no longer recognized on asus a6km laptop

[hveerten]

Hi,

For some reason my wireless hardware is no longer detected. 'ifup wlan0' gives the following error:
Device wlan0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

I have fedora 8 installed and gave up on trying to get wireless running a while ago. No I am trying anew but the error above didn't occur before. I do have a working (?) ndiswrapper installed. Ndiswrapper -l gives me:

bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4318) present (alternate driver: ssb)

When I had fedora core 6, I actually had a working wireless connection, even with WPA-PSK, using wpa_supplicant. However the message "(alternate driver: ssb)" didn't show then and that worries me as well. But first things first, does anybody have a clue about the first error?

[hveerten]

The problem "device not present" was easily solved, fortunately. ndiswrapper -v gave the following message
module version is too old!
utils version: '1.9', utils version needed by module: '0'
module details:

You may need to upgrade driver and/or utils to latest versions available at
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net

I remembered that I installed ndiswrapper in a weird way, since the repositories did not give me an executable. All I did was run pirut, install ndiswrapper (it was NOT listed as installed), restarted and I even have wireless enabled (over an unprotected network, wpa is the next step). ndiswrapper -v now says:
utils version: '1.9', utils version needed by module: '1.9'
module details:
filename: /lib/modules/2.6.23.9-85.fc8/extra/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper.ko
version: 1.48
vermagic: 2.6.23.9-85.fc8 SMP mod_unload

Hendrik