Realtek RTL8187B Driver for OpenSuSE?

[willyum]

i had just installed OpenSuSE 11.0, and everything works except for the network! I can't find the driver for Realtek RTL8187B. Please help!

[tjwoosta]

i have the same card

after messing with drivers for about three days straight i figured it out

the first thing i tried was a package search at opensuse website
Software.openSUSE.org

this found a few packages so i added the corresponding repositories and installed the kernel modules

This did not work!!, it had no effect whatsoever, even after rebooting wlan0 was still not even listed as a device


so i uninstalled it and i moved on to try using ndiswrapper with the windows drivers...

I tried win98 winxp and winvista drivers

win98 with ndiswrapper made it so i could see the networks fine, but could not connect
(i have only simple WEP Security by the way)

with winxp and winvista wlan0 was listed as a device but i could not see any networks or connect


so after all of this frustration i finally found a workinng linux driver for the 8187b card!!!


this driver is hacked, because the original realtek linux 8187 driver would not work with the 8187b(only 8187L)

this driver works on cards with the lsusb listing of 0bda:8189 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187B Wireless 802.11g 54Mbps Network Adapter

the driver works with every linux distro that i have tried with a 2.6 and higher kernel

it works with both 32bit and 64bit operating systems

first things first, you will need to install some dependencies

in yast, search for and make sure theese four packages are installed ( make, gcc, patch, usbutils, and kernel-source)

now check that you indeed have the right card

lsusb

(this is what usbutilis was for)
and

lspci

(you must be su to use lspci)

one of them should return something like this, somewhere in the mess of text (mine shows up under lsusb)

0bda:8189 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187B Wireless 802.11g 54Mbps Network Adapter

now that you have confirmed that this is your card..

download (rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz) and (2.6.24.patch) from here
What I did on my vacation from reality » RTL8187B drivers and patches

now download and extract the rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz to your home folder

then move the patch into the extracted rtl8187b-modified folder

then patch the driver like this

patch -p1 < 2.6.24.patch

now you are all set to make the driver

./makedrv

for this next part you will need to be su (super user) so do this to obtain su privleges

su

now as the superuser, run the wlan0up script to insert the kernel modules and start wlan0

./wlan0up

thats it, you should be able to connect now using the network icon on your taskbar (you will need to be patient with this driver, sometimes it takes a minute to kick in)


now you will notice that you will need to navigate to the rtl8187b-modified folder and run ./wlan0up as su every time you restart the computer

however there are ways around this

the original way to boot this file for ubuntu was to add some commands to your /etc/rc.local, but opensuse doesn't have an etc/rc.local

so instead we can use /etc/init.d/boot.local and add these lines
(obviously substiture yourusername for your actual user name)

/home/yourusername/rtl8187b-modified/wlan0up
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhclient wlan0
exit 0

(but, there is a problem with this workaround, if you do this then wlan0 will start during boot and do a bunch of DHCP requests)

now my boot time has increased dramatically because wlan0 tries dhcp requests for like 40 seconds before deciding its not going to work

(i still have to figure out how to disable the dhcp requests for wlan0 at boot, but thats another thread)

i should also point out that aside from the boot problem there are a couple of considerably large bugs with this driver

1. it will not work for me with WPA (it simply wont work with wpa, but it works fine for WEP or open networks)

2. the signal strength meter is broken (i can stand about 5 feet from my router and it says i only have one bar for a signal, the range is still normal, its just the signal strength that is off


please forward this thread on to anyone who has issues with the rtl8187b card because it took some time and effort on my part to write all of this, and i know there are alot of users struggling with this card

[lwfinger]

The RTL8187B is not supported until kernel 2.6.27.

I would not try to use the vendor driver - it is a real can of worms. What I
suggest is to Google for compat-wireless and download the latest version and
build it. That will get you the latest version of the driver found in the
wireless-testing kernel.

FWIW, you should post wireless questions in the wireless forum - you will get
noticed there.

Larry