Swimming in the Pensieve

2006.06.12, Monday

Wireless Woes: Reloaded

Filed under: Technology, Linux, Domesticity, Nuts-N-Bolts — Allan @ 09:39:21
Ever since posting, in ‘Wireless Woes‘, that I had no problems getting a Linksys WPC11-Version4 PCMCIA wireless card working on Linux, I’ve received the occasional email asking how I did it.Instead of continuing to answer emails with what amounts to snippets of crib notes on the procedure I followed, I’ll put this information here and tell you folks to read it for yourselves.

It really was quicker and easier than even a perfect windows driver installation; and, for the benefit of others who might find themselves in need of a working WPC11 on Linux, this is what I did:

I booted up the laptop with a (’junk’-CompUSA-branded) 10/100 PCMCIA card to give me Internet connectivity.

I dashed-over to http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List#L, and scrolled through the ‘L’ card listing real quick:

11. Card: Linksys #[WPC11] — [link here|List#WPC11]

    · Chipset: Realtek RTL8180L
    · pciid: 1186:3300
    · Driver: Don’t use driver that ships with card. Use driver for RTL8180L from http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?Keyword=8180
    · Other: See D-Link DWL-510 (the pci-id part). Works fine with 2.6 & kernel and ndiswrapper 0.8. also works with 2.4.29 Kernel and ndiswrapper 1.1

12. Card: Linksys #[WPC11 v.4] — [link here|List#WPC11]

    · Chipset: Realtek RTL8180L
    · pciid: 10ec:8180 (rev 20)
    · Driver: Don’t use driver that ships with card. Use driver for RTL8180L for Windows XP from http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?Keyword=8180
    · Other: The Realtek driver mentioned above works only with the 16KB stack kernels. I got mine for Fedora Core 3 from Linuxant.

13. Card: Linksys #[WPC54G], 54mbps — [link here|List#WPC54G]

    · Chipset: Broadcom BCM94306
    · Driver: ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pub/network/WPC54G_driver_utility_1.3.1.zip
    · pciid: 14E4:4320
    · Driver (Dell): http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R76521na.EXE (use the file that ends in “j” if you live in Japan or “rw” for anywhere else)
    · Other: Works with WEP and WPA with either CCMP/AES or TKIP ciphers. Scott says: Unzip the EXE file, and use the driver in the AR directory. Random cases of not being able to probe the IRQ, see the card, connect, etc. may be fixed by adding “acpi=noirq” to kernel params. This card works great on Gentoo 2004.2 with a 2.6.9 kernel and ndiswrapper 0.11. Card also works fine with SuSE 9.1 pro and ndiswrapper 0.12.
    ·* Driver (Linksys): ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pub/network/WPC54G_driver_utility_1.3.1.zip
    · Other: Works without using any encryption. Still trying to get it to work with WPA/TKIP.

14. Card: Linksys #[WPC54G v2], 54Mbps — [link here|List#WPC54G v2]

    · Chipset: Texas Instruments ACX 111
    · pciid: 104c:9066
    · Driver: Linksys ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pub/network/wpc54gv2_driver_utility_v2.02.zip
    · Other: linux-2.6.8-gentoo kernel, ndiswrapper 0.10.Kept having kernel panic (interrupt-related) upon module load until I set CONFIG_PCI_MSI=y (and unset CONFIG_4KSTACKS, just in case.) Also, used “ndiswrapper -i LSTINDS.INF” (NOT lsbcmnds.inf). Works with 64 and 128-bit WEP. Sometimes need to repeat config info (and commit) repeatedly, else driver & card will ignore requested setup. Also works with Gentoo 2.6.9-r9, ndiswrapper 0.12 and drivers that came from CD.
    · NEW USER NOTE 12/30/05 by -JSK-: I had lots of problems getting the settings to take with this card and the above Windows driver. I finally found that the settings were timing and order dependent. Here is how I got the card to stick in Managed mode with 128 bit WEP and open authentication:

      · ifconfig wlan0 essid $ESSID mode ad-hoc
      · sleep 1
      · iwconfig wlan0 key $KEY open
      · sleep 1
      · iwconfig wlan0 key open
      · iwconfig wlan0 key on
      · sleep 3
      · iwconfig wlan0 essid $ESSID mode managed
      · sleep 1
      · iwconfig wlan0 key $KEY open
      · sleep 1
      · iwconfig wlan0 key open
      · sleep 15
      · ifconfig $DESIRED_IP_MASK_BROADCAST_ETC up

    · I know it’s a hack, but this script works every single time for me. Before, life was miserable. On debian, you can put this in a shell script and add a “pre-up” line in your interfaces file instead of using the “wireless” options. YMMV.
    · Other: Working fine on Ubuntu Breezy Badger (kernel 2.6.12) using ndiswrapper 1.9 / ndiswrapper-utils 1.7 and lstinds.inf driver. –Johnmxl 10:45, 13 February 2006 (PST)
    · Other: Ndiswrapper is not needed. In Ubuntu Dapper (and probably in other Linux distributions as well) this card is supported natively with the acx driver. See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75448 –neu or http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1114757&postcount=31 for a summary of the fix –GigaClon

15. Card: Linksys #[WPC54G v3], 54Mbps — [link here|List#WPC54G v3]

16. Card: Linksys #[WPC54G v4], 54mbps — [link here|List#WPC54G v4]

17. Card: Linksys #[WPC54G v5], 54mbps — [link here|List#WPC54G v5]

18. Card: Linksys #[WPC54GS] SpeedBooster, 54mbps/125mbps — [link here|List#WPC54GS]

    · Chipset: BCM94306
    · pciid: 14e4:4320 (rev 03)
    · Driver: Linksys ftp://ftp.linksys.com/pub/network/wpc54gs_driver_utility_v1.0.zip
    · Other: Ndiswrapper 0.10rc1 Manual compile. Works fine. Also reports speed up to 125Mb/s. Suspend/Rsume also works great. Great card, hassle free install.
    · Other: Ndiswrapper 1.9 manual compile on SuSE 9.0, kernel 2.4.32 (ix86). Have found more recent versions of ndiswrapper would compile but fail to load the module with an unresolved symbol error. Works great with the driver mentioned above together with WRT54G router and wpa_supplicant 0.4.6 (rpm binary)., with WPA enabled (”WPA Enterprise”-mode). Still I was not successful to get the card to authenticate with the router set to “WPA2 Enterprise”-mode. For SuSE 9.0 you will need to manually add libhistory.so.5 and libreadline.so.5 to your system in order to meet the requirements for wpa_supplicant (e.g. extract them from the readline-5.0-1.2.i586.rpm)

Item #12, above, informed me that I needed to cruise over to http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloads1-3.aspx?Keyword=8180; which is exactly what I did.

When I got there, I found 3 possible URIs which would give me the files I needed:
ftp://61.56.86.122/cn/wlan/rtl8180l/ndis5x-8180(173).zip
ftp://152.104.238.194/cn/wlan/rtl8180l/ndis5x-8180(173).zip
ftp://202.65.194.18/cn/wlan/rtl8180l/ndis5x-8180(173).zip

…as well as one that I made note of, for future reference:
Linux kernel 2.6.X 1.5 2005/04/19 695k Site 1 Site 2 Site 3

As root:
I created a directory, /inst/wireless/linksys/wpc11 , in the root of my filesystem.
I used wget to download ftp://61.56.86.122/cn/wlan/rtl8180l/ndis5x-8180(173).zip into the /inst/wireless/linksys/wpc11 directory.
I extracted the contents of ndis5x-8180(173).zip into the current directory ( /inst/wireless/linksys/wpc11 ).
This gave me the following directory contents:
-rw——- 1 root root 104101 2005-12-02 23:48 ndis5x-8180(173).zip
-rw——- 1 root root 14747 2004-10-06 10:48 NET8180.INF
-rw——- 1 root root 12518 2004-10-14 11:25 Release.txt
-rw——- 1 root root 185344 2004-10-07 15:37 rtl8180.sys

I executed the following command:
ndiswrapper -i NET8180.inf

Next, I reconfigured the WiFi connection settings using the KDE-based tools. (Basically, pasting-in the 32-character ESSID and setting the channel.)

I then executed the following two commands:
ndiswrapper -m
reboot

As the machine rebooted, I replaced the 10/100 card with the WPC11v4 wireless card.

At login–less than 4 minutes after I started the whole “let’s install wireless thing”–I had wireless connectivity, and could finish-up the router configuration to exclude potential neighborhood wireless leeches.

Next-up was to update ndiswrapper through apt-get, as I surfed-around a bit.

A perfect driver installation from the Linksys CD, under windoze, would still be running; and I would still have to fiddle with the ridiculous configuration and network scanning utility that Linksys thinks is whiz-bang.

As we have finally replaced the old, Version 2, Linksys WAP11 with something with a bit more flavor; wireless has become the thing to do with the laptop computers that come winging their way through the house now and again. This has afforded me the opportunity to observe quite a few windoze installations and the ‘uneasy’ way that they all seem to deal with wireless connectivity.

windoze machines seem to take forever to acquire a wireless router and establish a reliable (in most cases, sporadic) connection. Even using the above-listed windoze drivers, I see nothing approximating the same sluggishness out of ndiswrapper-utilizing Linux machines. I can only conclude that, all other things being equal, the difference lies in the efficiencies of the Linux OS; since I normally boot up with wireless connectivity already established.

I would hope that this would be a positive indicator to those who compare the two Operating Systems, but that seems to be what amounts to a vain hope. It is my experience that windoze users have no interest in reliability and efficiency (the hallmarks of a superior product); staying, instead, with something that is nothing more than familiar.

I must admit to confusion over this, but no loss of sleep.

Follow the above directions, and enjoy.

UPDATE:

Allow me to insert a #19 listing for the Linksys line of wireless cards:

19. Card: Linksys #[WPC54GS Version 2] SpeedBooster, 54mbps/125mbps — [link here|List#WPC54GSV2]

fuzz graphic gradient

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