Re: [Rtl-wifi-devel] Realtek rtl8187B wireless chip support for linux

[Hin-Tak L. <hin...@ya...>]

Johnny Cuervo wrote:
<snipped>
> It's functional, just a little glitchy. I've had people tell me WEP/WPA
> breaks, and signal strength isn't reported. The on/off switch doesn't do
> much of anything, either, but I don't know if that's the device's
> problem or the rest of the system's.
<snipped>
> If I can help at all, let me know.

There is a new mac80211-based driver available from Herton of Mandriva,
and it needs a little change to get all functional, but it is working alright.
all the stuff, patches and discussions are in the bug report. Would be useful
if you have a go at it.

>>>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=432280

It is interesting to re-read what was written some weeks ago; yes, my motivation
for making the new driver work was that WEP causes kernel-oops - and
I have also observed that the on/off switch does nothing (unlike how it is under 
Vista). I have not tried encryption with the new driver yet, but it is likely
to be cleaner and probably would "just work". (I believe the old driver breaks
because of crypto changes in the kernel). Also the new driver is quite happy
to be unloaded (modprobe -r'ed) so one can change/mod within limits and just 
overwrite the old module and do depmod -a and reload again. The old driver
is quite buggy in that it sometimes(often?) locks up on unload.