Note: The information here relates only to the old ieee80211 stack driver. If you're using Ubuntu, you will find that from Intrepid (and probably Hardy also now) there is a new driver present as standard which should work perfectly through the standard graphical network management tools.
A few days ago I posted a patch for the Realtek 8185 driver (r8180), updating it for 2.6.24 kernels. I expected at the time that somebody would fix it properly before the final release of Hardy and that any people coming here for the patch would be running the development branch, so they would probably already know what to do with it.
But I hadn't realised quite how close the Hardy release date was, and as it turns out Hardy was released without this driver completely. Consequently, quite a lot of people have ended up here looking for a solution, so this is an attempt to provide more complete instructions on what to do.
I've already written a brief guide on using this driver with wpa_supplicant, but for getting it compiled and installed in the first place, this is what you need to do...
Note: French speakers may also refer to the guide here
I'll go ahead and assume that you do have a working internet connection of some form since you've managed to get to this site, but note that you do have to compile the driver on the same machine you intend to use it on, or at least one running the exact same kernel version and architecture.
- Make sure you have the necessary tools installed for compiling stuff:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic patch
- Download the driver sources:
wget http://willdaniels.co.uk/attachments/rtl8185.zip
- Extract the archive and change into the extracted folder:
unzip rtl8185.zip
cd rtl8185 - Compile the driver (don't worry about the warnings, so long as there are no fatal errors):
./makedrv
- Test that the modules load correctly using:
sudo ./wlan0up
- If everything is working, copy the compiled kernel modules to a better location:
sudo cp rtl8185/*.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/net/wireless
sudo cp ieee80211/*.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/net/wireless - Update the module dependencies file:
sudo depmod -a
There is one final step required to ensure that the driver gets loaded on boot. If you only plan to use WEP security (or none) then probably the easiest way to achieve this is as follows:
sudo -i
echo ieee80211_crypt_rtl >> /etc/modules
echo ieee80211_crypt_wep_rtl >> /etc/modules
echo ieee80211_crypt_tkip_rtl >> /etc/modules
echo ieee80211_crypt_ccmp_rtl >> /etc/modules
echo ieee80211_rtl >> /etc/modules
echo r8180 >> /etc/modules
exit
Alternatively, if you intend to automate the configuration for WPA(2) you might as well configure /etc/network/interfaces to load and unload the modules as required instead (since WPA is not supported by the standard graphical tools for this driver anyway) in which case refer to the separate WPA article here.
