Realtek 8101 wireless with Slackware 14.1
 

I have Slackware 14.1 (32bit) installed on a Dell Mini 9. Everything is working well with the exception of the wireless interface. There is a working eth0 interface but no wlan0 interface recognised at all by the system (ifconfig -a). I remembered that one of the Ubuntu variants needed a "non-free" module to get things working properly. I downloaded the source code from the realtek driver page but was not able to get it compile due to errors. Has anyone been able to get this wifi chipset to work with recent versions of Slackware?


Some of the errors from the build process follow, in case anyone is able to offer help with the process:
/root/tmp/r8101-1.024.00/src/r8101_n.c: In function 'rtl8101_rx_vlan_skb':
/root/tmp/r8101-1.024.00/src/r8101_n.c:1909:9: error: too few arguments to function '__vlan_hwaccel_put_tag'
__vlan_hwaccel_put_tag(skb, swab16(opts2 & 0xffff));
...
/root/tmp/r8101-1.024.00/src/r8101_n.c: In function 'rtl8101_hw_set_features':
/root/tmp/r8101-1.024.00/src/r8101_n.c:1970:25: error: 'NETIF_F_HW_VLAN_RX' undeclared (first use in this function)
if (dev->features & NETIF_F_HW_VLAN_RX)

I downloaded r8101-1.024.00.tar.bz2 (release date 6-27-2013) from Realtek's website and tried building locally.

Turns out a few changes introduced in kernel 3.10 are causing the compile failure:

• The vlan_hwaccel_put_tag tagging function now takes a protocol argument
• The hardware acceleration VLAN feature flags were renamed to include "ctag"

To fix:

1. Get my patch: r8101-1.024.00_linux3.10.diff
2. Place it in the r8101-1.024.00 directory
3. patch -p1 < r8101-1.024.00_linux3.10.diff

Let me know how things go.

--mancha

I have the Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express that works out of the box with Slack64 14.1
How did you configure network, dchp or networkmanager when you installed?

Same here, RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express. lsmod shows r8169 is used. Worked out of box. However, this is my WIRED interface.

Thanks. The module compiled without any errors or warnings. It seems to load properly on boot as well (r8101). Unfortunately, there still does not appear to be a wlan0 interface (ifconfig -a). Nothing shows up in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules either. I've never ran into this problem before with Slackware. Is there something else that I'm missing here?

Good to hear my patch worked.

Are you sure the Realtek NIC isn't ethernet on your mini with some other make/model wireless NIC? Check your HW with:

--mancha

As I said earlier I have the same running out of the box wired and wireless, plus on two different Dell laptops and a HP (diff. controller) using both dchp and networkmanager. Can't have both, it's one or the other. Run netconfig and choose one, dchp or nm, make sure it is executable in /etc/rc.d. KDE NM and WICD work flawlessly for me.

Hope you get up and running. Good luck.

I'm an idiot. The realtek is my eth0 interface and the wireless is a Broadcom chip. I somehow managed to ignore that when looking at lspci before - it was only the line above the Realtek in the lspci output. I've only been using Slackware since 1994, so you'll have to forgive me.

To make this thread useful to someone else, the wireless on my Dell Mini 9 is a Broadcom BCM4312 and was easily enabled with NetworkManager after installing the b43-fwcutter and b43-firmware packages built from Slackbuilds.org.

BTW, thanks for the input on this.