How to use Linksys PCMCIA Wireless-B card?

[kookie]

I have an Dell Latitude CS, circa 1998, 128M ram, 6G HD, that I was hoping to revive... no internal network devices, but a PCMCIA Linksys Wireless-B card. Got the Puppy 4.0 iso file, fired it up, installed pretty effortlessly, which was impressive as I had tried to other distros that hung at various points of their installs. So already I was liking Puppy.

So I run the network wizard, things went fine but dhcp would not give a network address
- I have other windows laptops, so assumed the dhcp server was ok
- the wireless card works ok in Windows box
- in the Wireless config part of wizard, did scan, it saw nothing, so i figured something major was amiss

The card apparently has the Realtek RTL8180 chipset.

Looked in Puppy Manual, WLAN page not there yet

Googled ["puppy linux" wireless] and found WifiAndPcmcia on the Puppy Wiki which sounded perfect
- it said "Puppy does not come with the drivers or base installation of ndiswrapper to run wireless."
- I foolishly did not look at the date of the article: 8/7/05

Started down the ndiswrapper path, installed that, copied over Windows files (all, of course, completely unnecessary, but 20/20 hindsight and all...), rebooted (a Windows habit), did Network Wizard, same results. But it was a cool exercise, as I was learning all sorts of new commands like iwconfig, dmesg, modprobe, etc... the guts of Linux (I think). This interests me, but I'd really like to get things going.

I look at dmesg and see some stuff about rtl8180 (the Linksys card chip set from Realtek, which I learned via my ndiswrapper exercise), and how the driver is experimental... hmmm. So, I then realize that:
a) there is some Linux driver for this thing in there, and my ndiswrapper efforts were for naught (except for the learning)
b) the Linux driver is experimental = flaky, perhaps

So... I removed my driver from ndiswrapper, also tried to remove the ndiswrapper module (modprobe -r ndiswrapper), just to excise the whole ndiswrapper thing from my environment... didn't seem to work, don't even know how necessary it was.

So I start looking through the forum, finding more wifi article, most of which are saying the same kind of things, but each with it's own extras... then I saw "[Solved] Pcmcia WI-FI rtl8185 based" in the beginners help section... this seems close enough to my problem. The poster had another msg saying he solved the problem after reading this (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 470#144470) where there were some downloads for the Realtek devices. So I download the proprietary driver from Realtek .pet file, got that installed on Puppy, did the modprobe commands in the readme, rebooted(!), tried the network wizard... same results. Looked at dmesg and saw the old "experimental" driver was still in there, didn't see anything new that would indicate the proprietary drivers were there.

So... somehow I have to tell this thing to use the Realtek driver (r8180) and not the default drivers (rtl8180) for the wireless card. Using my limited Unix skills, I used the "find /" command to find where the old driver might be, and found /proc/net/rtl8180 and sys/bus/pci/drivers/rtl8180. With this information... I was still lost. Running "modprobe -l" shows the r8180 (Realtek) driver, but not the rtl8180 (experimental) driver

So I search the forums for "change driver wireless"... read through a bunch of wireless problems for a few hours, but can't find anything.

Any ideas are much appreciated... especially if there was some better way to get to a solution.

Thanks.

[kookie]

Ok... never mind. Not sure what happened, but was showing the problem to somebody, using the network wizard, hit the scan button, and now it sees my network... and everything worked.

Rebooted and tried it again, and this time the scan didn't see the network, retried 3 or 4 times, the exited out, restarted the wizard, did the scan, and it saw the network. I'm sitting right next to the wireless router. So things look like they're mostly working.

I'd still like to know how to tell what driver is driving the wireless card, and how to change that driver if necessary.

Thanks, off now to continue down the Puppy path...

[silver-city-productions]

I am going to guess it's a realtek rtl8185. While the r8180 kernel supplied driver with the Pup seems to be more usable than either the sourceforge or vendor-supplied linux driver (which are based on the same source I believe), I am staying with the ndiswrapper'd windows 98 driver. You can get that from Realtek's website. Puppy has ndiswrapper installed already.

Once you have the driver available to Puppy, you need to do the ndiswrapper installation of the driver. There are three files that you need, net8185.sys, net8185.cat, and net8185.inf. Put them into a directory, and then cd to that directory. enter:

Code: Select all

ndiswrapper -i net8185.inf

Check to see if it's ok by:

Code: Select all

ndiswrapper -l

You should get a display like

Code: Select all

net8185 : driver installed
	device (10EC:8185) present (alternate driver: r8180)

Next prep for loading:

Code: Select all

ndiswrapper -m

Then remove the kernel supplied module:

Code: Select all

modprobe -r r8180

And load the ndiswrapper'd module:

Code: Select all

modprobe ndiswrapper

At this point you will be ready for the normal wireless configuration battles.

After the first time through, the only steps are to remove the kernel supplied module then modprobe ndiswrapper to get the wireless card up.

[tempestuous]

Realtek Linux wifi drivers have been a problem for a long time now, especially for the newer RTL8185 chipsets.
But the soon-to-be-released Puppy 4.1 will have a completely new Realtek driver which should hopefully achieve better success. The new driver is called "rtl8180", not "r8180" as with earlier kernels.

[kookie]

Thank you... I had thought that ndiswrapper was a last ditch solution, but I guess whatever works best...

It looks like 4.0 came with the rtl8180, and I had thought that could be the problem (the "experimental" quote in dmesg scared me), so got the r8180 and tried to use that, but the rtl8180 doesn't look like a normal module, it doesn't appear in "modprobe -l", and I couldn't figure out how to disable it.

Anyway, thanks again, all's well that ends well... even if mysteriously... I guess.

[silver-city-productions]

Just curious; where did the 4.1 rtl8180 module come from? Is this a puppy-special? If so, congrats! A lot of effort and time has gone into trying to get these drivers up.

[kookie]

I dunno... I dl'd puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso, booted it up, installed to HD... rtl8180 was there. That what shows up next to wlan0 in the netowrk wizard.

[tempestuous]

It looks like 4.0 came with the rtl8180

From memory, this is wrong. But I'm on holidays at the moment and can't check.
Puppy 4.0 has the same 2.6.21.7 kernel as Puppy 3.x, so it should have the old r8180 module.

"rtl8180" might be a description of the chipset in the Network Wizard, not the name of the module ...
or you may have inadvertently downloaded the experimental "Puppy4.0-k2.6.25" ...
or you may have installed the experimental rtl8180 driver I contributed here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 470#144470 ...
or you may be referring to the name of the Windows driver which is wrapped within ndiswrapper.

In any case, speculate no further, this is old news. I suggest you get Puppy 4.1 when it is released. This definitely has the new rtl8180 (Linux) driver.
Or if you can't wait, get Puppy-4.1alpha2 now, from
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... inux/test/

[tempestuous]

where did the 4.1 rtl8180 module come from? Is this a puppy-special?

No. It's a standard module with the latest kernel. Development is based here -
http://rtl-wifi.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page

[silver-city-productions]

The old kernel supplied module posts messages under the rtl8180 name, but in lsmod is r8180. That's probably where the confusion came in.