For a few months now I have been frustrated by Mandriva 2008 and getting ndiswrapper to start at boot up. For some reason Mandriva insisted on loading the BCM43xx module even though I explicity set up ndiswrapper as the driver for my broadcom wireless card. I had tried everything from modifying /etc/modprobe.conf to using the Mandriva drakconf interface to tell it to set up wireless with ndiswrapper. The drakconf interface would set up ndiswrapper and get things working, but once I rebooted it would want to go back to loading the bcm43xx driver.
After searching the internet intensely, I found out that the kernel will attempt to load the bcm43xx kernel module no matter what unless you explicitly blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-mdv
Put the following lines in blacklist-mdv:
blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist ssb
I’m not really sure what ssb is, but from what I gathered it was part of the Broadcom 43xx driver set.
You may also want to do:
modprobe -r bcm43xx
modprobe -r ssb
Now use drakconf interface to set up your wireless card again, make sure you select the ndiswrapper option.
Next time you reboot you should now boot using the ndiswrapper kernel module instead of that annoying bcm43xx driver!
