hi, "kcalvert"

I had a look at an image of your PCI card on the Zonet USA website and it looks incredibly similar to my Edimax card. The Zonet USA site does not seem to have any drivers available for this card, and the Zonet Taiwan site is not up at the moment.

Why don't you try the slightly mad procedure which got the card working for me - I posted the details in this thread on 17th September. The machine I installed it on was RedHat 8 stock kernel (2.4.18.14, I think, I don't have the machine in front of me at the moment).

I would say that the driver for the RTL8180 chip is much the same whichever card manufacturer you get it from - the important difference would seem to be the kernel which the "closed" part was compiled under. It might be worth searching for as many versions of the closed part of the driver as possible, on the different card manufacturer web sites, and trying them all!

This list is one of the saddest lists on this forum. It's sad because setting up a wireless card shouldn't be this difficult or this complicated. Although my identity says "newbie" I am reasonably experienced in Linux. Indeed, I have designed networks and firewalls and such.

I have yet to get this card to work and I have given up after 6 weeks...yes count em six weeks of trying.

Frankly, I have never encountered this amount of difficulty ever. It is a blistering indictment of the Linux community (myself included) that we are unable to provide drivers or to help (this support forum is incredible and generous) what is a very important and ubiquitous technology. What would a newcomer to Linux think when a very popular piece of hardware (Linksys) cannot be supported or run into this much difficulty while using it. I cannot blame them for fleeing to windblows.

It pains me to say this but I got my card working on my (dual boot) XP machine in less than 4 minutes. Thank god, i set up a vfat partition so I can swap files back and forth.

I continue (and will) to do a lot of work in Linux, indeed 90% of my work is in Linux. Sadly, I cannot do the most important thing, surf the internet; use Evolution (scary thought is I have to use Lookout in xp) to pick up my mail. I have to download all my software on Scary P (XP) and then boot into Linux to install them.

Until the wider Linux community can tackle this and related problems on the desktop we don't have a prayer of ending the monopoly.

On a personal note, I would like to thank everybody who helped me and tell newbies that wireless complications should not deter you from what in my opinion remains a fabulous system.

I fully agree with capedc.
It is a pitty that this card is so difficult to install (if you can get it to work at all).
I have been using Linux und my P2 233 laptop and it just worked great except that wireless card.
Now I have to switch to windooze so I can surf the net and watching divx movies fluently on the machine is impossible in windows.

What about a petition to open source these drivers?

I went and bought Linksys WPC 11 Ver 3 and it freezes my laptop running RH9 when inserted. I looked at the reading list and it was supposed to work out of the box.

What a nightmare, any suggestions as to why (yet) another card is not working. Sadly, I expected to be severly disappointed and it came true.

Can anybody recommend any card that does work...nominally...

Hey, hey, hey this driver has NOTHING to do with the Linux Community.

This is produced by Realtek, who hasn't exactly replied much to inquiries for specs or to open the 3/4 chunk of the driver that is precompiled binary (and the source of all the hastle). Without that information, in order for the open community to write a driver, it would have to be blackboxed from the ground up... which is a nightmarish tedious process. Some of the more patient people on the planet are trying just that with the ACX100 chipset from Texas Instruments, most commonly found in the D-Link wireless offerings with "+" around them. Just check out the work they've gotten done and how hard that was to do: http://acx100.sourceforge.net

This driver is closed source in action.

So do something about it, mail support@realtek.com.tw and ask them to provide the source code for priv_part.o, heck maybe we can get it into the hands of someone who can make the card work well!

This thread is nearly 20 pages long and has been viewed by about 100 people for every member that has posted here, it pretty much shows up first in google when google is asked about this chipset. If you pester them enough, they might actually reply.

Anyway, enough rant.

Cheers,

Finegan

I am not blaming the Linux community just you must agree that it should not be this difficult to get a card working.

A lot of this stems from my frustration to get it working and having to rely on (heaven help us) windblows.

For your information, I am currently exchanging emails with
the realtek support on the issue that the driver freezes
Mandrake.
They try to solve this issue and I try to help them, but
Linux is obviously not their usual OS.

Every mail I send contains the suggestion to open the
driver source.

I am on the edge of giving up and ask the reseller for a
replacement card with a better linux support.

Maybe if
first : they loose sales and
second : they loose manpower
on this driver, they will finally come to this solution.

I have been in contact with their support also. The person I have contacted has admitted very little experience with Linux. He has asked me a few questions with no real progress and now I haven't heard from him for 2 weeks. I have asked for them to just recompile the priv_part in Mandrake 9.1 (I know that is a bit self-centered but this is the only system that seems to be getting the lock-up on enable). I tryed getting another card (DLink 650) and found out that they have 4 different versions of the same model number and guess which chip they use on the newest version.!!!!!!
Well, sorry I don't have anything to add, just felt like venting some frustration. Otherwise Linux has been very very good to me.

Sorry this is a bit OT.

In reply to post #272: Maybe we should make some kind of petition, huh? Or, how make them think more seriously about opensourcing the code?

It gets so very annoying that so many new hardware are bluntly closed source. Even if they decided that they should support OS like Linux (like what RealTek did), they ended up with a non-functioning, closed-source driver. What a waste of manpower?!

As to post 277: I doubt if our woes (of not being able to use hardware devices) would somehow reduce the sales of these devices. Unless, if so many computers would suddenly switch to Linux or *BSD as their OSes, which I doubt would happen soon.

Oh no!! This thread isn't on the first page anymore!.... I'll fix that --

Thank you to everyone in this thread who worked hard to get this thing working... (esp. finegan). Just thought I would post this with the hope it will help someone else.

Actually, I have a Netgear MA521, and using the wlanup scripts in this post, I was able to get some promising messages in my system logs. The card's link light would light up and dmesg would report the correct BSSID and channel.
RTL8180: Select a BSS and Join it at channel 1.
RTL8180: ----------------------------------------------------------
RTL8180: wlan0 Link status:
RTL8180: Channel number = 1
etc...

But I could never ping anything except the card itself. After reading this thread over and over, I finally decided to try different kernel versions. 2.4.23-pre5 did nothing. However, after installing 2.4.20, I am now able to get on the internet. So, it appears that kernel versions can make a difference, as I didn't change anything else (except recompiling pcmcia-cs and wireless tools). SO, to anyone who is having issues, I would recommend an older kernel (especially quiescere... Based on your post I would swear you were working on my computer. Everything was identical, incl. the kernel version 2.4.22). Also, I noticed that in Windows, the link light is solid... But in Linux, it is not. This made me think that I was not connected properly, but it does work with a blinking link light. Well, good luck to everyone, and thanks again (now I'll try turning on WEP ....)

David

Edit:

LOL - I clicked on this thread again so I could roll it over to 23000 views. I wonder what the record is??

Good to hear you got it running. Still no reply from the driver maintainer, I wonder if support@ may make a difference...

Right now, 45k I think, the Screenshot thread.

Cheers,

Finegan

After spending several hours of kernel panics, compile errors and no connections I got it.
I put the results on my homepage: http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlange...p/rtl8180.html

It seems that the private_part.o from the SuSE-driver is compiled with kernel 2.4.20 and is version 1.1, but the drivers from the realtek website are version 1.3 and compiled with kernel 2.4.18 ...
really strange...

Now I'll open a bottle of beer, sit back and enjoy surfin' ;-)

Good luck to all the others!

Hi,

First I would really like to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread, without it I would have been totally lost.

Having all this information at hand, it only took me a "few" hours to get it up and running. The card seemed to be up and running after a short while, judging by the nice logs showing the channel, ssid and router mac... Only problem was it was just up, not running

I had to read a lot of posts until someone figured out that it just wasn't working with a 2.4.22 kernel (thanks). So switched to a 2.4.21 and just magically it worked! And enabling wep was just a walk in the park having all these nice scripts at hand

Only problem is now ACPI isn't working (kernel patch ck3). Wish I had a nice thread like this one for all my laptop needs...

Well thanks again for all the help.

JS

Btw, it's an inspiron 5150 w/slackware-9.1+dropline gnome and I would just like to share how impressed I was when it worked right out of the box, save a few minor things like modem and acpi (which would have worked had i picked the right kernel when installing it...)

Well, I bought two cards (dlink usb and d-link dwl-650), the usb was a bust. Got my hands on a Linksys Ver 3 but no luck as it locked up my system.

Gave up and decided on a fresh install of RH9, did that and my Linksys ver 3 locked up again. Singularly frustrated I decided to dump these cards (and get my money back) and decided to concentrate on Ver 4. After numerous attempts and so many steps that I have forgotten what I did.

I finally got the card to work partially but now I get TX low descriptor unavailable...on all screens and I have to turn of my PC uhh what did I do wrong...

Thanks

Btw, does anyone know if there are a way to scan for AP's in range and get the signal strength and stuff like that?

The gnome panel applet tells me there are no wireless interfaces, so I guess the strange way of dealing with this thing using only iwpriv makes it look like it's not a wireless interface to the applet.

I would really like to be able to easily check what AP's are in range and not have to go to windoze to do so... I made some nice scripts that let me store wep info in files and give a custom SSID on the command line, but it doesn't help much if I don't have an SSID

Any tips is welcome, in the mean time, I'll be ing...