Rtl8187

Mben · Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 3:07 pm Post subject: Rtl8187

Does anyone have a RTL8187 802.11G USB card working with Gentoo/Linux? I am trying to get the one that came with my Asus m2n32-deluxe working, and haven't been having any luck. ndiswrapper detects it but won't find my network (a fairly standard belkin router, 128bit wep). The native linux driver in portage installs with lots of warnings and won't load due to a whole bunch of unresolved symbols. I have tried several kernels, but the board seems to work best with 2.6.18r4 overall.

Any help is appreciated.

Logs and messages below, if it helps anyone...

Korhul · Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 9:26 pm Post subject: Doesn't work for me too...

I have similar problem although I don't have such a huge amount of warnings :-)

my dmesg say this:

Mben · Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 12:27 am Post subject: Re: Doesn't work for me too...

iainvt · Guru Joined: 12 Sep 2004 Posts: 462 Location: UK

i have ndiswrapper with the .inf file from realtek, got the solo wireles adapter realtek 8187 on a p5b delux mobo working
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iain

Mben · Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 10:34 pm Post subject:

I think that is the same card I have (Asus calls it a "Wifi-AP solo")

Did you have to do anything special to get it to work? It seems to me like my card isn't turning on the radio, since ndiswrapper detects it but it doesn't pickup any access points.

I have tried the realtek driver, and the one on the Asus cd (maybe you have an older version of the realtek driver).

Enough speculation, any tips?

iainvt · Guru Joined: 12 Sep 2004 Posts: 462 Location: UK

Type: ndiswrapper -l
If there are any drivers listed, remove them with: ndiswrapper -e (driver name)
Now, type: ndiswrapper -i (driver name).inf

Do ndiswrapper -l and check to make sure that it lists your driver and says "driver installed, hardware present"

Type: depmod -a

Type: modprobe ndiswrapper

Now you should be ready to set up your wireless card
To do that:
1. ifconfig eth0 down (to make sure your comp is forced to use the wireless card)
2. ifconfig wlan0 up
3. iwconfig wlan0 key (key type, i.e. open) (key here)
4. iwconfig wlan0 essid (network name here)
5. dhclient wlan0
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iain

Korhul · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 2:14 pm Post subject: Kernel freeze

I have tried ndiswrapper tonight.

I can only load driver for 64bit Windows (since I'm on amd64), driver for WinXP/2k gives me some errors (I haven't tried W98/Me, I assume thewre will be the same issues complaining about 64 bit system). When I execute modprobe ndiswrapper everything goes OK until I try to set essid with iwconfig. Then my kernel freezes after a few minutes...

iainvt · Guru Joined: 12 Sep 2004 Posts: 462 Location: UK

Sounds like some kernel issues here
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iain

Mben · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 11:39 pm Post subject:

The 32bit version installs fine (on x86 anyway), but can't find any access points

Following the instructions above I am left with (from iwconfig)

iainvt · Guru Joined: 12 Sep 2004 Posts: 462 Location: UK

what are your sleep scan settings, could up the time to 20-30 seconds...
Have you also tried scanning for any AP...
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iain

Mben · Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:07 am Post subject:

I have tried scanning for APs with iwlist, no luck

I'm not sure what you mean by sleep scan settings (nor am I finding much on google), where are these set?

iainvt · Guru Joined: 12 Sep 2004 Posts: 462 Location: UK

Sleep scan settings can be found in /etc/conf.d/wireless

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Wireless_Configuration_and_Startup

default setting is '0', this means the card scans as soon as it is powered on, give it a delay and you may find it picks up an AP, also try taking off the WEP encryption for a minute or 2 on your router and try a rescan, some cards+drivers often have issues with WEP, it is fickle.
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iain

Mben · Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 11:38 pm Post subject:

I tried the sleep scan option, no help. The card doesn't appear to be powering on at all (no lights), even though it is detected. Disabling wep doesn't help either (also tried an adhoc net with another computer)

Any other thoughts? I'm at a loss (and have been for awhile now)

kllrnohj · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 11

I managed to get the "official" driver to work OK on AMD64 with the RTL8187 chip on the Asus M2N32-SLi Delux, here's how:

First, the README and the ebuild fail to mention needed kernel settings (well, the EBUILD has the checks in it, but that line is commented out - wtf?) Anyway, the kernel IEEE80211 stack must be disabled in kernel. You also need the crytography API enabled, along with the CRC32C library routines (ARC4 is needed for WEP) - Kernel module autoloading is also a good idea.

Then you can try modprobe r8187, but I set up the modules autoload to do it in steps, aka, modprobe ieee80211_crypt-rtl, modprobe ieee80211_crypt_wep-rtl, modprobe ieee80211-rtl, modprobe r8187

Unfortunately, I get a hardlock with it when running Xorg 7... (Not sure if its Xorgs fault or the drivers, though, as links2, emerge, etc.. all work fine as long as X isn't running)

Try as I might I have been unable to have any luck with ndiswrapper to see if it works any better than the linux driver (which, as far as I can tell, realtek just copied from here: http://rtl8180-sa2400.sourceforge.net/ )

Korhul · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 7:02 pm Post subject:

Mben · Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 12:47 am Post subject:

I also have it (sort of) working. It seems to hard lock a lot, but I can't relate it to X. Actually, If I escape out of the boot process using the I key and skip most of the start up services it doesn't seem to lock as much, and I can start X, etc. Just the driver running, without a connection seems to be fine

Both the realtek and the driver in portage seem to die the same way.

Anyone have it stable? I will try a different kernel later.

Thanks for the info though, we are making progress

Korhul · Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 7:45 am Post subject: Some mistake

I made the "well.done" gong too much early I think. When I tried to make further set up of my wirelless network it locked up my system again.

So this is what /var/log/messages contains:

kllrnohj · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 11

Huh... I am also running gentoo-sources-2.6.17-r4 and I didn't have any of those problems, although the driver is under the GNU GPL, so it shouldn't cause licensing/kernel tainting (unless I misread that).

Mben · Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 8:37 pm Post subject:

kllrnohj · n00b Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 11

I just 'emerge rtl8187' to install it, here is my .config (I just updated to -r7, but the config is more or less the same as the one I had for -r4)

Mben · Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2006 10:17 pm Post subject:

Well, I can't seem to get the native Linux driver stable. I did manage to build the cvs version (there are some patches on the sourceforge page to get it to compile against recent kernels), and tried kllrnohj's config but my system still crashes shortly after I connect to a network.

I did manage to get it working with ndiswrapper though. Turns out there is a newer version in portage, 1.23, which was (as of a couple days ago) hard masked for "testing". It works quite well using the Win98 driver from Realtek's site, without any special configuration.

I guess that can be called a partial solution, I would like to have the native Linux driver working, but this is definitely better than nothing. I emailed the Linux driver's author, but haven't heard back yet. I am still at a loss as to why some people have it working and some don't :?:

Korhul · Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2006 8:21 pm Post subject:

Hm... I have modified my .config according to what kllrnohj posted before. Starnge outputs from system log are gone but it still has tendency to crash. System log shows this:

wu-s · n00b Joined: 22 May 2006 Posts: 41

A workaround to get rtl8187 working (manually) on 2.6.18 can be found here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-508210.html