Has anyone heard anything about monitoring capabilities of the rtl8180 chip in some of the new wireless cards? I am using the driver posted on the realtek website.

there are people who in the forum who is saying the monitor capability could be done when using ndiswrapper.
couldn't remember the exactly link, but you can find it at
http://404.bizhat.com
try ndiswrapper either ndiswrapper-0.8 or .10, because some people have problems with .9

I am not sure what "monitor mode" means but with driverloader
the chipset can do 'iwlist scan'

monitor mode means your wireless card can collect any traffic or signal it receives which is like a hacking thing. i might be wrong on that though.
not sure about driverloader since no one likes to pay for a LINUX driver!
why bother if you can use free ndiswrapper to get your rtl8180 working or even the old Suse driver?

"All traffic" can be received as with tcpdump?

ndiswrapper-0.8 didn't work for me.
ndiswrapper-0.10 does though so now I don't need to pay for driver :-)

"The old Suse driver" - what is that?
I am running SuSE 9.1 (2.6 kernel) the card
is a Belkin one, so PCI vendor/product differ from RealTek's (but I think that is all
that differs).

you can find the Suse driver at http://404.bizhat.com -> Gigafast WF721

Ok I have tried that driver (the latest one in series from realtek site), but it is
for a 2.4 kernel and I have 2.6.
I haved hacked up a Makefile in 2.6 style, and tweaked open C code to get rid of
warnings and it builds and links. But it doesn't load as private .o file has references
to __generic_copy_from_user() and __generic_copy_to_user() which don't exist
in 2.6, tried writing wrappers to call __copy_from_user_ll() and its twin and it
loaded. But but obviously did nasty things, segfault in shell, as X server went AWOL.
Such is the problem of semi-open drivers :-(
So I am out of my depth for the time being.

try ndiswrapper,
even it's in a testing mode right now, it still works pretty good.
in my opinion, works great than other linux drivers which was written for rtl8180's chipset.
you don't have to upgrade your kernel or anything.
just download ndiswrapper-0.10, then download the latest XP driver from RealTek. AFter you extract ndiswrapper, all you really need is the commands, which will be in the INSTALL and README file.

As I said above I _know_ ndiswrapper-0.10 works it is what I am using
to post this ;-)
As far as I am aware that is latest (there isn't a 1.0 yet).