I got Ubuntu upgraded to 8.04. It took me a while to figure out that esound makes things very unhappy. If your Gnome desktop is hanging or otherwise misbehaving, try “sudo killall esd”, and “apt-get remove esound”.

Also, the rtl8187b driver does, indeed, dislike the 2.6.24 kernel (mine is 2.6.24-16-generic, and no, I don’t know why I’m not using the 64-bit version). I applied Hin-Tak Leung’s patch (here), and all is well — or, at least, as functional as it was with the 2.6.20 and 2.6.22 kernels.

I also got Cc’d in a couple emails to Andrea Merello, who basically said …well, to be honest, I have no idea what the hell it boils down to. I guess there’s still someone at the helm of the RTL8180 driver, and the rtl-wifi project isn’t as dead as it looks.

Also, thanks to the people who donated a couple bucks! You made me lose a bet with datamorph, damn it. :-)

Sorry again for the lag, I’m working on improving.

1. Carl, May 15, 2008:

   The driver saved my ass.

   I tried to buy you something from ThinkGeek, but it insists on shipping to my address. I can’t use PayPal–they won’t accept my credit card any more unless I open an account, which I am not going to do. So, can I maybe send you an Amazon gift cert?

2. cuervo, May 17, 2008:

   No sweat; you pretty much have to use the button on my site to get the wishlist.

   If it’s still being stupid, don’t even worry about it; those other guys probably deserve it more than I do, anyway. :-)

   And, thanks!

3. Carl, May 21, 2008:

   I can get to the wishlist, but when I try to check out it asks for a shipping address, and of course I don’t know yours.

   In any case, no online vendor can stop me from saying: Thank You.

4. billy, May 22, 2008:

   want to say thanks for helping me to use my wireless in debian testing. i struggled for like a month before i got your modified rtl8187b drivers and it worked. seems though it stalls when i try to log on to a wep network. the pc hangs and i have to reboot. thanks man.

5. Leonardo, June 30, 2008:

   I wrote an e-mail to Realtek (wlanfae@realtek.com.tw) asking for a driver that works on kernel 2.6.24 or later, connects using WPA and shows the signal strength. After one bussiness day, they send me a driver, probably a development version, that compiled under Hardy (kernel 2.6.24-19) and did all I was expecting from it. For those who are having troubles with RTL8187B, do the same and you’ll get a functional driver.

6. Reinier, August 3, 2008:

   It seems the WEP authentication hangs the whole machine, if you run ubuntu 8.04, though, so be carefull:

   http://danmarner.blogspot.com/2008/01/rtl8187b-linux-native-driver-works-on.html#c2112934869930085966

7. agjopxz, September 22, 2009:

   lama1234