Realtek RTL8187B

[David Hollis]

On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 01:17 -0500, Mike Chambers wrote:
> Have installed F9 (er, well, rawhide anyway as of today) is why asking
> on this list.
> 
> This wireless driver is in my laptop that I bought from Best Buy, which
> is a Gateway laptop.  I thought Realtek drivers were opensourced?  Or at
> least I guess maybe only wired drivers are?  I can't seem to get the
> laptop to recognize the wireless driver.  It's connected in there
> somehow via usb, which lsusb does show the driver.
> 
> Do I have to use ndiswrapper to make this work or should it work out of
> the box?  If out of the box, what steps to get it to load and be
> recognized?

Unfortunately, this device isn't supported by current kernels.  I just
purchased a couple of these off NewEgg for $15 because the device was
listed as well supported by the zd1211rw driver but it turns out that
the manufacturer has changed the chip used which is now the RTL8187B,
and alas, unsupported.  The rtl8187 driver currently in the kernel has a
decent portion of the bits to support the device but not all of them.  I
managed to add the proper device IDs, it detects the device but is
unable to bring up the PHYs since there are apparently a number of
changes from the RTL8187 chip and the RTL8187B chip.

I would suspect that support ought to land in-kernel in the next few
months so either a later F9 kernel update or F10 should bring in full
support.

Until then, you are sadly stuck with ndiswrapper.

Oh, there is a hacked-up driver available to seems to work for some
folks, I can't remember the URL off-hand.  Apparently, it may work but
doesn't seem to support encryption well, or a bunch of quirky things.