I have finally gotten permission from Realtek to submit the new driver to the
staging directory of the mainline kernel. This also means that I can allow users
to download from the git source repository so that they can build their own
versions. If you are interested in doing this, you will need to install some
packages. To get the ones you need,
sudo zypper in gcc make git-core qt3-devel
Once these packages are loaded, then get a copy of the source:
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/lwfinger/r8712u.git \
linux-r8712
That linux-r8712 at the end is the directory that will be created to hold the
source tree. You should change it to whatever you want. After that command
finishes, change to that directory and do the following:
zcat /proc/config.gz > .config
make xconfig
If the make step fails because of missing packages, resolve them. Once the
configuration screen comes up, navigate to the “Staging drivers” section of the
left panel, and in the right panel deselect the items for RTL8192 and select
RTL8712U. Save the new configuration and do the following:
make
If you have more than one CPU, add “-jN” to the command where N is one more than
the number of CPUs. After that finishes without error (it will take a while), then
sudo make modules_install install
When that command finishes, you will have new options in the GRUB menu. Boot the
one that has 2.6.36 in its name. The new driver has the firmware built in, thus
you will not have to worry about it.
Let me know how it goes. The git tree is up to date with the Linux-2.6 mainline
tree, which now has kernel 2.6.36-rc3.