When I first purchased this laptop in March 2008, I had studied the components and believed them to be completely Linux friendly. The RTL8187B internal USB chipset included with this laptop confused me because there were native Linux kernel drivers already available for the RTL8187, so I assumed this would be compatible. But as it turned out, this RTL8187B is not compatible with the RTL8187 driver. The RTL8187 will recognize the chipset, but will not connect with it. And, since it is an internal USB connection, lspci would not find it. So, I set out to get it going with Ndiswrapper. This took some investigation, but the Ndiswrapper solution is here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-wireless-networking-41/configuring-a-rtl8187b-wireless-card-on-a-toshiba-satellite-a215-s5802-in-ubuntu-7.10-631453/?highlight=RTL8187B
It was very easy to get it going in Slackware 12.1 with Ndiswrapper using this solution. And, like most things in Slackware, it has been very reliable and has never failed. I simply put the config commands (iwconfig commands) in /etc/rc.local and it is available at boot. I have used the same method to get this chipset working with Ndiswrapper in three different distros (Slackware, Ubuntu and Puppy).
I had read somewhere on the net (don't remember where) that native Linux support would be included with the release of kernel 2.6.27. As of this date (September 2008), 2.6.27 is still in rc status. I downloaded and compiled this kernel and can confirm that this kernel does in fact have native support for this chipset and it worked right away with this driver. I installed this kernel just as a test to see if the new driver did in fact work, but will not use it as my default kernel until it is released officially and it should be noted that dmesg notifies that this driver is still experimental and the user does so at their own risk. I have had no issues with it, and it provides a stronger signal than I got with ndiswrapper.
Slackware has always been the most stable and reliable distro for me, and now, with ALL of my hardware natively supported, I couldn't be more pleased.
