I've noticed the same questions being asked over and over in the forums that link to my site, so I've come up with this little mini-FAQ.
This was never intended to be a permanent solution, I just pulled a very quick and dirty hack to the driver to get myself online, and dubbed it ``good enough for me, so I'll post it''. Since the official driver seemed to be taking its sweet god damned time getting support for the damned thing out there, I was about ready to roll up my sleeves and get a hotel room in kernel land once more...
...But it seems there is real, non-quick-n-dirty support for this POS already on the way, so I can get back to writing angry Perl programs and you can get back to, let's face it, RickRolling your friends.
Trust me, I'm keeping as close an eye on this as you are. Hell, I remember waiting for USB support in the 2.0 kernels.
The patch does two things. It adds explicit support for my wireless card, USB ID 0bda:8197, and allows you to override the detected card, in order to try the driver with cards that might have been manufactured with a different USB ID after the driver was released.
If your card doesn't work, you might want to try passing one of the following parameters to the module:
force_card=0x8189
force_card=0x8187
It's really not a huge patch. I just added a fallthrough for my specific card and an override for other cards.
Yup, but none of them have been fatal, as far as I'm aware. Don't worry about them as long as you don't get something like this:
make: *** [stuff] Error 1
If you do get a real fatal error, try the 2.6.24 patch.
Yup. Sucks. :-(
I've only gotten the card working in managed and ad-hoc. AP mode seems to do exactly the same thing as ad-hoc.
Short answer: I don't know. Try it and find out! :-)
Long answer: Do an lsusb | egrep '0bda:81(87|89|97)'. If your card comes
back, it ought to work.
Unpack the driver:
tar xvfz rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz
Change into the driver source directory:
cd rtl8187b-modified
Compile the driver (note, there are a hell of a lot of warnings):
./makedrv
To load the driver:
./wlan0up
Andrea Merello is in the docs as the original author of the driver. Johnny Cuervo (hi!) made this simple patch to fall through for the 8187B, and modified it a bit further to override card detection.
Hin-Tak Leung wrote the 2.6.24 patch, and J. Adams wrote the -jadams patch.
Beats me, I've never even tried it with my Prism2 cards. I've heard you need to use wpa_supplicant or somesuch.
In /etc/network/interfaces, change your wlan0 definition to look
something like the following:
iface wlan0 inet dhcp wireless-essid my-network wireless-key1 s:mykey wireless-mode managed wireless-channel 6
pre-up /root/rtl8187b-modified/wlan0up post-down /root/rtl8187b-modified/wlan0down
The pre-up says to run a command before the interface is brought up, and
post-down says to run a command after it's taken down.
For more information, see interfaces(5) and wireless(7).
After everyone kept telling me there was real support in 2.6.27 for the 8187B, I finally got around to rolling my own kernel and testing it out a bit. I'm pleased to report that it looked good, but I didn't bang on it too hard. Signal strength was properly reported and I didn't see the momentary hangs I've experienced with my patch. I didn't spend too long under .27 because I didn't feel like fixing everything else that went wrong (mostly the X server), so I'll wait for Ubuntu to upgrade the kernel, but those of you under Debian, Slackware, etc., might want to upgrade.
http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/
Home for this patch, until the rtl-wifi SourceForge project (http://rtl-wifi.sf.net/) picks up.
The rtl-wifi SourceForge project page. Hasn't released any code yet, but see http://rtl-wifi.sourceforge.net/wiki/Download
Probably not, but I keep telling everyone it is.