Comment 37 for bug 293946

When you say it "wiped" out the older rtl8187 driver, that means the find+grep command I mentioned above only shows one .ko file? (namely r8187.ko or something like that?) Perhaps re-installing your linux kernel package should bring it back -- assuming that's how it was originally installed. (Or maybe there is a separate rtl8187 ubuntu package?)

Also, like I and others have said here earlier, it does seem to work with the 2.6.30 linux kernels. Find out how you can manually upgrade to these newer kernels, which don't yet appear in Ubuntu's official repos?! (There are helpful websites out there already with the newer packages ready to download/install.)