FAQ

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RTL-WiFi FAQ

Please feel free to add questions (and/or answers)!

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When are these drivers going to enter the linux mainline kernel?

RTL8180 2.6.25 Initial commit 2007 October released 2008 April
RTL8185 2.6.25 Initial commit 2007 October released 2008 April
RTL8187 2.6.23 initial commit 2007 May released 2007 October

The definitive list of supported devices is in drivers/net/wireless/rtl8180_dev.c and rtl8187_dev.c. See also Mac80211

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When I run make it deletes all the source files

This happened to me on Fedora Core 6 (and 5), at least with 2.6.18. The first thing to know is that this only applies to the older source trees, the current ones (*-newstack) have an up to date Makefile that doesn't suffer this problem, so consider trying the newer driver first. It seems that the parameters passed to make have changed at some point. The MODVERDIR gets created and emptied by the kernel makefile, which is not what we typically want :-) Edit the makefile, and change MODVERDIR near the end to just M, so you end up with 

$(MAKE) -C $(KSRC) SUBDIRS=$(PWD) M=$(PWD) modules

(I don't know if the M= is required at all since it supercedes SUBDIRS, all I know is that it worked for me). Ash

This should be fixed Admin

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What's the easiest way to get this working for...

There are a few versions of the realtek drivers carried over from the old project. Some of these will work better on certain cards and certain systems. Personally I had more difficulty building some trees than others, and some distro's might require workarounds that others don't, hence a "path of least resistance" based on distro....

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Fedora Core 6/7

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*-newstack (currently being developed, may or may not work for you)
  • The *-newstack drivers are meant to be the currently developed drivers so try those first
  • I (Ash) and at least one other(That would be me mcKidney) have been unable to get the rtl8180 version to build on FC6.

mcKidney: Actually, first i tried the original project, then here i tried both versions with few errors. I even could not build an official rls of rtl drivers... If anybody successfully builded one of these on Fedora Core latests kernels. Please even just write down few simple informations, about it.

Otherwise, if you can't get one of the *-newstack drivers to work, try the older one:

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sa-2400 driver (older, but works)
  • Use the rtl8180-sa2400-dev tree (the changes are already integrated)
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Ubuntu

  • the RTL8187 mac80211 driver is included in the current development version which will be released this October as Ubuntu 7.10 "Gusty Gibbon". It works out of the box (even with NetworkManager) with my Digitus RTL8187 USB device (I've only tested WEP, though).
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Debian

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Sarge

The following instructions are based on my experiences using a Linksys WPC11 v.4 with debian 3.1 (sarge) kernels 2.4.27 AND 2.6.8, as well as debian 4.0 (etch) kernel 2.6.18. ~D.L.E.

  • Users of Debian 3.1 (Sarge) with a 2.4.27 or 2.6.8 kernel can still use the old driver, available from the other rtl8180-sa2400 sourceforge website. I used the 0.21 version with 2.4.27, and was forced to upgrade to the 0.22_pre20050528 version when I moved to 2.6.8. I haven't tested the newer driver (available from this site) on Sarge, but it would probably work fine -- see the instructions for etch...
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Etch
  • Users of Debian 4.0 (Etch) with a 2.6.18 kernel will need to use the driver available from this (rtl-wifi) project, due to the makefile-deletes-sources bug. I used rev. 52, a snapshot of which is downloadable as "rtl-wifi-20070221.tar.bz2" on the "Installing" page. Upon downloading this, one has several options:
    • rtl8180-sa2400-dev tree: I had an easier time getting this one working: just cd to that directory and type 'make'. It does not require anything from the other directories, or removing modules from /lib -- and it even includes handy module loading and unloading scripts. However, I couldn't get it fully working with NetworkManager. Worse, whenever I unloaded the module and/or ejected the card it caused a kernel panic and hung my system. So I eventually got around to trying the new stack:
    • rtl818x-newstack: I assume this is the ideal choice for my Linksys WPC11 v.4. First I moved /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/net/ieee80211 out of the way to a backup location. Then in the rtl-wifi ieee80211 directory, 'make', and in the rtl818x-newstack directory, 'make'. The "installing" page instructions worked pretty well from there, although I've written a script to load/unload the modules rather than using 'make install'. Now I can unload/eject without a kernel panic! And NetworkManager works, as well.

~David L. Emerson.

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Lenny
  • Currently (2008-07-26), Debian testing (Lenny) uses kernel 2.6.25. This means it contains the kernel mac80211 based drivers. Lenny does discover my RTL8187L based network adapter (Netgear WG111v2) and load the driver for it.
  • If you want to use the drivers from this project you will have to blacklist or delete the mac80211 driver to prevent it loading or alternatively unload it with rmmod before loading this project's drivers.
  • Also the version (currently 0.6.3) of wpa_supplicant provided with Lenny does not support the -D ipw option required by the drivers from this project. I downloaded (see Links) version 0.5.10 (currently the latest 0.5 version), used tar to place the source under /usr/local/wpa_supplicant-0.5.10, compiled it and made a link from /usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant-0.5.10 to ../wpa_supplicant-0.5.10/wpa_supplicant.
  • I used rev. 83 which is currently the latest revision of this projects drivers. This compiles and works with my RTL8187L based network adapter (Netgear WG111v2).
  • However, if you want to install the driver permanently you should make target modules_install, blacklist/remove the kernel's mac80211 based drivers and ieee80211 modules and run depmod.
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Gentoo

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Ark Linux

Starting with kernel 2.6.23-0.rc6.1ark, the mac80211 version of the driver is included in the Ark Linux kernel. Use apt-get -t dockyard-devel install kernel to get the current kernel, rtl818x will work.

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What's with the Logo?

The logo is still open for discussion, see the Forum Thread about that one if you'd like to make suggestions or offer a replacement. Essentially the claw is a nod towards the Realtek "Crab" logo, suitably dissassembled / reverse engineered / opened up (to individual pixels), and the waves is... you know... wifi! Ash

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