rtl8192se driver problems, with staging driver and ndiswrapper
 

I've got a new Toshiba laptop with a Realtek 8192 wireless card in it. Card works fine when I boot it into Vista, so I started looking for Linux drivers.

Sabayon comes with ndiswrapper installed, so I went looking for the ever-elusive Windows XPx64 driver. I think I found one, and after a few days of fighting with it, I've got ndiswrapper saying that the driver is loaded and the device is present.

Good so far. Loaded the ndiswrapper module, but wlan0 did not appear. Not so good.

After a couple more days of looking at logs and PCI addresses, I found the popular C0000001 error about pnp. Not sure how to fix that.

In this last week somewhere, I also tried the staging driver in the 2.6.30.1 kernel. It's for the usb version only. There's a PICe driver for the 8171 that's also in staging, but it's for the wrong version. I saw somewhere that there was a PCIe version of the 8192 driver in the works, but I'm impatient.

My question is: Should I keep on with the ndiswrapper approach, or try hacking the two staging drivers together? The former might go nowhere, but the latter is something that I have no experience with. Right now I need the machine for school and I don't want to use Vista.

I don't know what you found, but there is talk of the 8192 on the linux kernel mailing list. Expect plenty of email on that list if you join - that's a warning. I had to join once and got about 10 digests of 50 mails each per day! But there is something coming in the kernel module route. There is a module for the 8187 & 8188 in 2.6.30.5, and that wouldn't need ndiswrapper, although it probably would need firmware.

Thanks for the reply.

I misspoke in the opening post... I've got kernel 2.6.31-rc7, not 2.6.30.1 -- although it doesn't matter too much. *shrug*

Thanks for the warning about the mailing list. I'm at a brick wall as far as ndiswrapper goes, so that leaves the module route. I guess I'm off to read up on Linux kernel and module coding.

It was heard that the latest rtl8192se Linux driver can support Linux kernel up to 2.6.31.

If required, I can provide the rtl8192se Linux driver package from Realtek, or you can also send mail to wlanfae@realtek.com.tw for querying for the latest one.