I've also tried to get this card working on RedHat (2.4.20-20.9). At first I downloaded the driver from Realtek (v1.2), compiled and it worked. At least somewhat, without WEP or anything and not very stable, but well..

A few days back I downloaded the new driver and compiled it. It inserts fine, in dmesg it looks fine, until I try iwpriv wlan0.
Iwpriv gives Wlan0 and then just a lot of crap, ending with "segmentation fault".

So I decided to go back to the v1.2 driver. I lost the compiled module, so I recompiled. Now this driver gives the same problem? I tried to retrace my steps, but I don't see where I go wrong?

The "old" suse module seems to work slightly better. When I insert it and try iwpriv wlan0 it gives the normal list of ioctls. The moment I enable the card however it starts eating memory until the computer locks (or I remove the module).

But I don't get that the driver worked before and doesn't anymore? Any suggestions or places to look will be appreciated.

Anyone have apm suspend working with this card? After unsuspending the driver barfs into it's lovely kernel panic.

-Jon

Well, that was alot of reading.

I just bought this card, stupidly not realizing that there was a new version(4), after fighting a losing battle with a Proxim orinoco(which, btw is not orinoco).
I grabbed the latest realtek driver for the wpc11v4 and compiled it according to the readme. When I insmod it, it seg faults and anything network related that I try to run (ifconfig, iw*) freezes up.
In lsmod, it says that the driver is initializing, but that's all the further it ever gets.
Dmesg says:

******** RTL8180 Wireless Lan Driver 2003-06-11 loaded********
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 03:00.0 to 64
RTL8180: 03:00.0: region #0 IS a PIO resource!
RTL8180: request_region(0x00009800,0x00000100) !
Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 000e0109
printing eip:
dcd87ce4
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0002

and then a bunch of crash-y stuff afterwards.
I'm using Mandrake 9.2rc2, was going to go back to 9.1 but I see that has it's own problems as well.
Thinking on going to try the suse version of the driver to see what that does. All in all, though, I find this continued problem with wireless cards being upgraded and the makers not having drivers for all OS rather frustrating.

Hey.
Has anyone noticed that there is a new driver version available at ftp://152.104.125.40/cn/wlan/rtl8180l/
rtl8180l_linuxdrv_v13(gcc3.xx).zip
rtl8180l_linuxdrv_v13(gcc2.9x).zip

I just downloaded the driver but haven't tested it yet.

Yes i now that, but it is not working with the 2.4.22 kernel, i don't have tested with 2.4.20, but i now that it is not working with 2.4.21 too. I can compile it, and insmod, and enable, but ut just receives dates, without sending out something i just will wait for the next release, i hope that then it will work in both directions

Hmm.... I think i solved part of my problem. I reinstalled the src-kernel packages and recompiled the driver (the v1.3 one). Now the drivers loads, iwpriv gives the list of Private_ioctls.

When I run the wlanupscript the driver also enables and I don't get a kernelpanic or memory loop or any other nasty stuff. (So far at least). I can't test the connection now (I'm remotely logged-in from work and the AP is off).

Can anyone tell me wether iwpriv wlano wlan_para is supposed to give output? I just get a blank reply.

It seems to be working for me now, but...

dmesg has the normal output of the driver and then:

IBSSJoin(): Please check out the following ...
IBSSJoin(): BSSID = 0x02:0xe0:0xfc:0xbc:0xa8:0x5e
IBSSJoin(): SSID = server2
IBSSJoin(): dot11BeaconPeriod = 100
IBSSJoin(): dot11DtimPeriod = 0
IBSSJoin(): dot11OperationalRates = 0x0f
IBSSJoin(): mCap = 0x02

this is repeated constantly (and also logged in messages, the file is more then 6 MB in a couple of hours..)

I have no clue what it wants me to check out?
So if someone could tell me either how to resolve it or how to silence the output, it would be appreciated!

Where do you get version 2? I have had absolutely no luck with v.13, and many of the linux gurus I have spoken to say that it's a piece of crap driver. I don't know of anyone who has gotten it to work. They all say to go with the version 2 driver, but I can't seem to find it anywhere!

Hi, I am new here, and just want to
join this forum, because I found many answers
to my problem, and I can see I am not alone
in face of them.

I have bought 2 Peabird cards because they claimed
to support Linux, and when installing them, I faced
all the problems recorded there.
These cards use the Realtek 8180 chip.

I am running Mandrake 9.1 and I succeeded in installing
the driver, with some non-blocking messages.

But when I started to use the card, a simple ping though
the card made my PC frozen.

I have sent an email to Realtek and Peabird, and will
keep you informed of any answer.

It was the same with me jmpocheau, I got the card really cheap (25€) and it was said that they support linux....now I'd say they support it to some degree....

I spent weeks in trying to get it work, reading this thread up and down but had no luck.
At first it just didn't find my router, later it crashed my whole laptop....

I wonder if there will be a usable driver someday.

I've just bought the Edimax PCI card which uses the RTL8180 and has been mentioned before in this thread.

The lesson I've learnt is RTFM (or more accurately, Follow TFM!).

I downloaded the Edimax drivers and tried to use their precompiled Redhat 8 module. I'd installed RH8 on an old Pentium III for use in our bedroom, and want a wireless link to my main box. To save time on the RH install, I'd not bothered installing the compilers or kernel source, so I wanted to use a precompiled module.

It insmod-ed without a problem, but refused to connect to to my AP, even though I spent a day trying everything in this thread and more besides. Eventually I decided to try the Realtek rather than the Edimax driver, and bit the bullet and installed the development and kernel source stuff so I could compile it.

I edited the kernel version in the makefile and it compiled, insmod-ed and also connected to the AP using the default wlanup script. But the connection was really, really slow - reminded me of the bad old 56K modem days. Then I noticed, both in the syslog and in my AP's log, that the card was reconnecting to the AP every 5 seconds, with a authorisation failure dropping each connection as soon as it was made. So I spent another few hours trying every iwpriv parameter in the book, to try and remove this error, with no success.

Finally, I went back to Edimax driver, this time compiling one from the supplied source. Didn't even need to change the kernel version in the makefile, as it was already set for the stock RH8 kernel. Guess what? It worked like a dream, first time, with the default Edimax wlanup script! All I had to do was add a "route add default..." line to the script and I was connected to the world. Didn't even need to set the ssid, never mind anything else.

Guess what the Edimax README says - try the precompiled driver for your kernel, and if this doesn't work, compile one from the provided source.

If I'd done that at the start, it would have taken less than an hour, including installing the necessary packages on the box, rather than nearly two days. If I'd already had a box capable of compiling modules, it would have taken less than 10 minutes, quicker than even doing a Windows install with the inevitable reboots. There's a lesson in here somewhere!

I got the same Edimax card and so far failed to make it work. Precompiled driver or not, it still does nothing.

Not to mention nice kernel panic (killing interrupt handler) when removing card without rmmoding module first (shouldn't this be done automagically?)

Somebody should persuade Realtek to release their drivers open-source, because this half-way they're doing it doesn't work on my Slack9 box (nor Gentoo...and I don't intend to switch over to RH)

Got a link to that Edimax driver source package?

Cheers,

Finegan

How does the script of your Edimax card look?
I don't believe that you need redhat to use this card.
It would be very nice if you could post the content of the wlan scipts or the link to their driver.

Thank you

It's generic rtl8180 script posted few times in this thread.
Point is, that "wlan0 has no wireless extensions" & "wlan0 - no private ioctls" (using iwconfig & iwpriv).