On Wednesday, April 03, 2013 18:09:02, Gary A Mort wrote: > On 4/3/2013 2:19 AM, Chris Knadle wrote: > > On Tuesday, April 02, 2013 23:41:36, Gary A Mort wrote: > > [...] > >> I have a low end, slow laptop and Linux Mint was nice and zippy, did > >> everything at the speed I wanted.....except the silly Realtek wireless > >> card would not work properly. It constantly dropped my connection, > >> would not connect, would not connect to open wifi networks, etc. > >> > >> It got to the point that I finally gave up and am unhappily using > >> Windows 8 and counting the days until I can upgrade to a new > >> computer....this time I will double check the network card compatibility > >> before getting it and then I will finally be back on Mint and happy. > > > > Out of curiosity was this in combination with using ndiswrapper? ... > I did try the ndiswrapper, but that was the last thing I tried.
Sounds like the right order to me; I consider ndiswrapper "the last resort". > First I tried the drivers in the apt repositories, then I tried compiling > and installing realtek's drivers manually[with presumably a binary blob > somewhere in their process] and then ndiswrapper. > > http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=48&PFi > d=48&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true#RTL8188CE > > The really frustrating thing is that in addition to the built-in card[a > RTL8192CE] I also have a usb version which I had used when having > trouble with my previous laptop. You did exactly what I would have done. The only thing I might additionally do is to look into which version of the Linux kernel might have the driver internally. It looks like the rtl8192c driver got integrated into Linux 3.8 in Oct 2012: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.8_DriverArch Looking at the kernel help, I believe the config option is CONFIG_RTL8192CU, which also overs the RTL8188. The typical thing I'd do from here would be to get the kernel source (the vanilla linux-stable Git repo, git checkout v3.8.5), start with the default config file from Mint's kernel by copying over /boot/config-$(uname -r) to ".config" in the kernel source directory, run 'make oldconfig' to make choices about new options, then 'make menuconfig' and make sure to include this wireless driver. Then build the kernel directly to a .deb package (two ways to do that -- the Linux upstream kernel has a tool for this, or you can use make-kpkg from the Debian kernel-package package), then install it and try it. If you want to try this, let me know -- I can help guide you through it. Also requires the 'firmware-realtek' package, the description of which (for the package in Debian Sid/Unstable) lists firmware for both of these devices. Building a custom kernel is something I've very typically had to do for new hardware. :-/ The mainstream distribution kernels tend to lag upstream by about a year. > Most troubleshooting steps include enabling software encryption - which > had worked for me before. On the new laptop it made things worse and I > found I had to disable it instead to get slightly better performance. > My guess is that there is a binary blob being used when on-card > encryption is used - and that the problem lies with it. There's a binary firmware blob for both devices, required to get them to work at all. Yay wireless. Almost all wireless devices have this issue. > Enabling software encoding moves things off the card and onto the CPU, > bypassing the problem. Since my new system is rather low end, I assume > the CPU just can't keep up with wifi. > > *shrug*....it works for windows and runs PHPStorm and Smartgit, so I can > use it for projects and get a better system a few months down the line. The fact that it works on Windows seems to contradict this. There's virtually no hardware that I don't think could keep up with wireless... wireless is slow. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it Apr 3 - Typography: Physical Art to Digital Art
