Realtek RTL8180 Wireless LAN (Mini-) PCI NIC - drivers?

[coltrane]

I was asking earlier about an obscure Netcomm WiFi card (802.11b), and it turns out that it uses the above Realtek chipset.

Does this help anyone recommend how to get Knoppix to use it?

[coltrane]

just wanted to add, this machine also has a Realtek RTL8139/810x Ethernet cable NIC, which also is not working.

To me it's looking like I need some Realtek drivers loaded?

[baldyeti]

Realtek provides non-OSS drivers here (http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?software=True&compamodel=RTL8180L). I haven't had much luck in using them, though. I can build the module, load it, the adapter is recognised and claims to join my SSID, but then fails to actually communicate (over IP). Please let me know if you go any further. Beware: the kernel crashes on me when disabling the wlan0 device...

Addendum: the same site has drivers for your ethernet card. I think linux should have a module called 8139too included. Try "insmod 8139too" and see if if exists and recognizes your adapter. Sorry I can't be more specific since I haven't used these myself.

[coltrane]

Thanks for the pointers, I will visit Realtek and see what I can do.

BTW: exactly where do you configure the wifi details (SSID, encryption key etc?)

[baldyeti]

Through calls to the "iwpriv" utility. Have a look at the included README, and the "wlanup" script.

[coltrane]

Excellent.

I hadn't downloaded the driver, but now I have, and have read the readme. All is becoming much clearer.

I will try it first chance I get (my laptop is at home right now)

[coltrane]

I have compiled the drivers from realtek.

Executing wlanup caused Knoppix to lock solid, so I tried each step manually...

insmod loads the driver without complaint. After setting some parameters with iwpriv I tried

iwpriv wlan0 enable

The command line prompt returns, but it's a solid lockup after that. No mouse, no ctrl-alt-del, zilch - have to power off and restart.

Any ideas?

[martinwguy]

RealTek updated their Unix drivers on the 13th Jan 2004, and the previous ones were acknowledged to be buggy. You might like to try again now.

M

[martinwguy]

Ok! I just had a look at their new driver and it's total junk like the previous one.
It is supplied as a binary-only black box called "priv_part.o" with a few K of readable C code
around it, and consumes 224650 bytes of core. Yes, that's 220K of code just to drive ONE device. Considering that the average entire linux kernel hovers just about one megabyte of compiled code, that is GROSS!

Not only that, but the driver feels so important about itself that it has to create its own special entry as /proc/rtl8180 Not /proc/net/drivers/, no, but right in the top of /proc.

The other issue, apart from its past tendency to crash your machine if you try to unload it, is that you have no idea what all that code is *doing* to your machine. It has not been reviewed by the Open Source community's sharp minds, ponly cobbled together by the poor code grinders who had to write it, nor can you have any idea whether it takes advantage of the network to send "customer survey information" back to RealTek. In 220K it could do *anything*.

I would have said "Give the card to a windows fiend, and get something properly supported", but the installation of the drivers on a windows 98 2Ed failed to find the files it wanted from the Win CDROM (which I gave it when it asked), leaving Windows complains about missing .vxd files when it boots up. Disinstalling the driver didn't fix this.

Conclusion: RealTek RTL8180 software support for this card is utter junk, both technically and politically, so don't buy RealTek network cards.

[coltrane]

I would have said "Give the card to a windows fiend, and get something properly supported", but the installation of the drivers on a windows 98 2Ed failed to find the files it wanted from the Win CDROM (which I gave it when it asked), leaving Windows complains about missing .vxd files when it boots up. Disinstalling the driver didn't fix this.

Conclusion: RealTek RTL8180 software support for this card is utter junk, both technically and politically, so don't buy RealTek network cards.

It is sold in Australia by Netcomm, and works very well in my XP machine. I would conclude the hardware is fine. Maybe the drivers I have for XP were rewritten by Netcomm, but they do work. Unfortunately Netcomm do not list Linux as supported.

[bjm]

I've got exactly the same problem - the realtek driver loads, lights on the card blink wildly (usually), but it fails to communicate with the base station. Unloading the driver hangs the system. Setting the channel using iwpriv wlan0 wlan_para channel=x does nothing, the channel always shows as "0". Using a tcpdump on the device shows that it is not getting a response when it sends arp requests.

Any ideas? What cards actually work with (Debian 3.0) Linux?