Fedora Core 8 wifi on Presario C700

I installed Fedora Core 8 on a new Compaq Presario C700. Most things
worked fine, but there was no WiFi, so I built ndiswrapper from
source, and downloaded the Windows driver package for the built-in
wifi adapter from HP's web site. When unzip couldn't figure out how
to unpack the self-extracting sp34152.exe, I built wine from the
source tarball so I could run the exe to extract the driver. I then
did the canonical "ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf", followed by
"ndiswrapper -l". The latter command says ...

bcmwl5 : driver installed device
(14E4:4311) present (alternate driver: ssb)

As many of you know, that means that the driver I asked for matches
the hardware on my motherboard, but the "alternate driver" part means
that when I did "modload ndiswrapper", the driver was not loaded
because the ssb driver had already claimed that hardware.

I presume that I need to boot, telling the kernel to ignore the ssb
driver. What I don't know, as a newcomer from FreeBSD, is how to tell
the kernel that. Nor do I know what the ssb driver is or does: my FC8
installation is missing all the actual source code from
/usr/src/kernels/2.6.23.1-42.fc8-i686/. There's no ssb page in
section 4 of the manual, either. Neither "man boot" nor "man
bootparam" answered my question.

How do I get grub to tell the kernel to ignore the ssb driver, so
my ndiswrapper'ed wifi driver can load? Is there a "disable" or
"blacklist" or similar parameter that I can ask grub to pass at boot
time?

Is there a man page that I haven't discovered yet that answers these
questions?

Thank you.

--
Chris Jewell (E-Mail Removed) PO Box 1396, Gualala, CA, USA, 95445


Chris Jewell