rtl8187b error while compiling

Bug #173880 reported by Orkun Sensebat
This bug report is a duplicate of:  Bug #215802: rtl8187 link quality poor. Edit Remove
8
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Debian
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned
Ubuntu
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Realtek offers a driver source for this notebook wlan interface. Although it is internal, it is regarded as a USB interface. Ubuntu cannot compile the source without recompiling the kernel, as I googled.

Revision history for this message
Orkun Sensebat (ihate88) wrote :

This problem can be started to fix thanks to cuervo: http://www.datanorth.net/~cuervo/rtl8187b/ offers a modified version of the source which can be compiled. The interface then works without wpa support.

This is the next thing to get fixed, could you help(a)? In Realtek's original package one could find the source of wpa_supplicant-0.5.3, the same way in the modified package of the source(I cannot tell, whether the author has made changes). How can I most beautifully and "ubuntuly" activate WPA support? If this works I can finally delete my windows installation and completely switch to ubuntu. Instead I just installed the ubuntu package for wpa_supplicant, but after some tests I could not connect to WPA-protected networks using NetworkManager. When I shall enter the passphrase, I can only choose between various WEP options.

When using manual mode I can at least choose WPA and enter information. Could not get it done anyway.

Can I here start deving? I would love to be able to make my notebook 100% availabe in the next ubuntu release.

Revision history for this message
Oliver Gerlich (ogerlich) wrote :

Here's a summary of what I found out for the driver available from Cuervo:

- it seems to support WPA only by using the customized wpa_supplicant contained in the tgz, which is based on wpa_supplicant 0.5.3. The differences between original 0.5.3 and the modified version are attached for simplicity.
- the driver only seems to understand WPA when wpa_supplicant uses the "ipw" mode (because the driver is based on the Intel ipw driver). I'm not sure whether NetworkManager would support this at all - IIRC it expects the driver to understand Wireless Extensions instead. So while this driver does support Wireless Extensions for some tasks, it doesn't support them for WPA.
- even when manually starting wpa_supplicant I didn't get it to work:
   - in WPA mode, it only received an "Association response status code" of 0xc (12) which translates to WLAN_STATUS_ASSOC_DENIED_UNSPEC . See the IEEE 802.11 specification for details (802.11-1999.pdf , Table 19 - Status codes: "Association denied due to reason outside the scope of this standard"). No idea why this happened; or maybe I misinterpreted the status code.
   - in WPA2 mode, it got associated with the AP, but then authentication timed out.
- as a side note, there seems to be a bug in the driver where it occasionally calls add_timer() on an existing timer (for the associate_timer), which leads to a kernel error message and apparently makes the driver nonfunctional from then until reboot. Replacing the add_timer calls for the associate_timer with mod_timer() calls seems to fix this particular bug, but there might be more severe problems hidden by that. Also, this change might be the cause for the authentication timeout in WPA2 mode.

Btw. you can get the 802.11 specifications at http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/802.11.html

So I have tried to get WPA working myself, and pretty much failed :-) and have then found that Ndiswrapper indeed works really well with this chipset. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/ToshibaSatelliteL40-14N (section "Wireless LAN") for details.

Revision history for this message
Adam Niedling (krychek) wrote :

I don't think it's Ubuntu fault that some code won't compile. Is this still an issue in Hardy?
Why did you assign this bug to yourself?

Changed in ubuntu:
status: Invalid → Confirmed
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