Driver for RTL8192CE and RTL8187CE PCIe devices now available

The mainline driver and firmware for the devices in the title is now available
for openSUSE 11.3 in the Wireless repo at
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/driver:/wireless/openSUSE_11.3/. This
driver services those units with PCI ID 10ec:XXXX, where XXXX is 8176, 8177,
8178, or 8191.

My thanks to Realtek for their cooperation. In the coming months, there will be
other Realtek drivers in the kernel. The plan is to get to the situation where
users no longer have to compile their own driver.

Great news and thanks a lot for the information.

Best regards,
Greg

Good news. I wish all companies would get onboard with Linux drivers. The situation has improved drastically over the years though.

On 12/17/2010 07:36 PM, rodhuffaker wrote:
>
> Good news. I wish all companies would get onboard with Linux drivers.
> The situation has improved drastically over the years though.

Actually, most are involved. Intel and Atheros have large groups working on
Linux drivers. Even Broadcom has contributed the brcm80211 driver to Linux.

… or has been improved
by / with the work of
some people
(presumably with great both technical and more social/political/economic skills).

See also in the (online) press:

Thorsten Leemhuis:
Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.37 (Part 3) - Network and storage hardware (The H online - Heise Media UK, 2010/12/16, 17:17 [GMT])

…] However, Wi-Fi driver developer Larry Finger has indicated that Realtek is now putting more effort into developing Linux drivers.
…]

Many thanks!
Martin
(pistazienfresser)

Hi,

I’m trying to build a custom Meego respin for my Dell Inspiron Mini 1018, using Smeego as a base. Said netbook uses the rtl8192ce WiFi chipset and a CSR-like bluetooth chipset from Motorola, as well as an x86-64 capable Intel Atom N455, and I wanted NTFS-3G included as I have some NTFS-formatted hard drives, hence I have at least three reasons to build a respin. I added the “Wireless” repo, and added the rtl8192ce and rtl8192ce-firmware packages. But when I built the respin, and booted it, the WiFi chipset remain unrecognized (I need WiFi badly, once I figure that out I’ll move on to the Bluetooth). The only way I’m able to get it online is to either use the LAN (recognized as it’s a common RTL8169 chipset) or WiMax USB dongle (which is recognized as a generic USB RDNIS adapter).

How exactly do I get this driver to work? Do I need the build tools and kernel source/headers, and actually compile this from source? Or do I wait until it gets contributed into the Kernel tree and subsequently built in the next OpenSuSE release? Please help, it’s stalling my progress.

As has been said in this forum many times, we need to know what device you have.
If it really is a PCI device, then post the output of the command ‘/sbin/lspci
-nnk’.

and added the rtl8192ce and rtl8192ce-firmware packages…

… and thereby missed to install the driver itself.

As for every openSUSE package containing external kernel modules, the driver is located in the respective <name>-kmp-<flavor> packages.

So without installing the kmp-package matching kernel version and flavor of the running kernel, no driver, no wireless.

Ah, so it’s a PEBCAK error on my end. Didn’t realize I needed the KMP packages, thought they provided modules for virtualization kernels :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks so much for helping! Wireless now working, and I’ve also figured out how to get ACPI battery and Bluetooth working in the meantime. Loving what I’m seeing so far.

Thanks guys!

glad to hear that…

Well, then maybe “for the record” one might add, that this “kmp” simply stands for:

Kernel Module Package

The build system of openSUSE automatically creates different types of KMP-packages by default, one for each kernel flavor provided by the distribution kernel (default, desktop, pae, xen, …), so the user has to install the kmp package matching the running kernel (version and flavor).

The output of

uname -r

will always be very helpful in this regard.

Maybe someone would like to add the related PCI-IDs as tag to this thead?
If not - I hope I am at least able to deliver them for the normal message body search in plain text:

10ec:8176
10ec:8177
10ec:8178
10ec:8191

Regards
pistazienfresser