Problems with chipset realtek.

[vladder]

Hi, I bought a wifi antenna with a realtek 8187 chipset and although it detects my network with a power almost 100% despite connect on the other side of the house, I find it impossible to navigate. My laptop has an atheros chipset card with it if I surf (badly) despite the poor reception. What can happen? The card with the realtek chipset appears as wlan4. I guess the problem is that the system uses the integrated wifi card instead of this, and I do not know how to put to it by default ...
Thanks in advance. Greetings.

[micia]

Hi, which network manager are you using?
NetworkManager, wicd, connman, or anything else?
Are you in a KDE4 environment, Gnome or anything?

Try to check the output of these commands:
(as root)

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ifconfig
iwconfig

when you think you have setup the correct connection, it will help you to find out which card is being used for that connection (and how that connection is setup). If you want to post their output here, ensure that there is no information that you don't want to share

You could also try the good old ping command to check if the connection is, at least, up and running:

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ping www.google.com

[Fitzcarraldo]

Did you know there is a new package called iw that supersedes iwconfig? See http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/iw

About iw

iw is a new nl80211 based CLI configuration utility for wireless devices. It supports almost all new drivers that have been added to the kernel recently.

iw is still under development. Features are added 'as we go'. The only documentation that exists for iw is this page. Please help expand it.

There is a page listing use cases with iwconfig and iw: replacing iwconfig.

Maybe your WiFi regulatory domain needs to be set correctly (see Linux wireless regulatory documentation or /usr/src/linux-2.6.37-sabayon/Documentation/networking/regulatory.txt). For example:

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# iw reg set CR

sets the WiFi regulatory domain on your PC to CR (Costa Rica). You can find the country codes in the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

A couple of days ago I installed the packages net-wireless/iw (nl80211-based configuration utility for wireless devices using the mac80211 kernel stack) and net-wireless/crda (Central Regulatory Domain Agent for wireless networks) and used iw to change the regulatory domain on my laptop to the country I am currently visiting. My main laptop does not have Entropy, only Portage, so maybe you already have the iw and crda packages installed if you are using Entropy.

Letting the kernel call CRDA

We use userspace events (uevents) to let the kernel speak to userspace. Below is an example udev rule you can place into your distribution's udev rules directory (usually /etc/udev/rules.d/). Note that most distributions have udev configured with inotify on the udev rules directory, so there is no need to restart udev after adding the new rule.

# Example file, should be put in /etc/udev/rules.d/regulatory.rules
KERNEL=="regulatory*", ACTION=="change", SUBSYSTEM=="platform", RUN+="/sbin/crda"

[Fitzcarraldo]

Moving this thread to the Networking and Wireless shed (forum).

[vladder]

Hi again,

Hi, which network manager are you using?
NetworkManager, wicd, connman, or anything else?
Are you in a KDE4 environment, Gnome or anything?

I'm usin NetworkManager on Gnome.

Try to check the output of these commands:
(as root)

Código: Seleccionar todo
ifconfig
iwconfig

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ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:23:5a:5f:79:da  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:22 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:362 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:362 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:32845 (32.0 KiB)  TX bytes:32845 (32.0 KiB)

wlan0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:24:2b:d3:c7:50  
          inet addr:192.168.15.105  Bcast:192.168.15.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::224:2bff:fed3:c750/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:89700 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:69962 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:125735953 (119.9 MiB)  TX bytes:7095871 (6.7 MiB)

wlan4     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:e0:0c:e0:a3:29  
          inet addr:192.168.15.104  Bcast:192.168.15.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::2e0:cff:fee0:a329/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:110 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:926 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:75583 (73.8 KiB)  TX bytes:147684 (144.2 KiB)

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iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0      IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"yukieltemerario"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:1D:7E:FF:C3:DA   
          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:D055-792C-FC
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=38/70  Signal level=-72 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:14  Invalid misc:3075   Missed beacon:0

          
wlan4     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"yukieltemerario"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:1D:7E:FF:C3:DA   
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:D055-792C-FC
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=59/70  Signal level=-51 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:15   Missed beacon:0

You could also try the good old ping command to check if the connection is, at least, up and running:

Código: Seleccionar todo
ping http://www.google.com

Only with wlan4 (wlan0 works fine)...

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[email protected] ~ $ ping www.google.com
ping: unknown host www.google.com

Did you know there is a new package called iw that supersedes iwconfig?

Maybe your WiFi regulatory domain needs to be set correctly

maybe you already have the iw and crda packages installed if you are using Entropy

Fitzcarraldo, I have installed the packages you suggest and I set my WIFI regulatory domain

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iw reg set ES

I restarted it after, but It does not work, I still can not navigate with wlan4 (USB card).

[Fitzcarraldo]

The Realtek 8187 is already enabled in the stock SL 2.6.37 kernel:

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$ cat /usr/src/linux/.config | grep 8187
CONFIG_RTL8187=m
CONFIG_RTL8187_LEDS=y
CONFIG_R8187SE=m

Is the module loaded?:

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lsmod | grep rtl8187

If it is not loaded, try loading it:

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modprobe rtl8187

See the Gentoo Wiki article Realtek RTL8187 for further details.

You may have to disable your other WiFi controller. You mention it is an Atheros controller. Which one? Use the lsmod command to see which Atheros modules are loaded and try unloading them. For example, if you are using the ath5k module then you would unload it by entering the command:

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rmmod -f ath5k

[vladder]

After ensuring that the module was properly loaded with modprobe rtl8187, this is the output from shell ...

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dmesg | grep rtl8187
[   17.892852] rtl8187: Customer ID is 0x00
[   17.892905] Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::radio
[   17.892946] Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::tx
[   17.893022] Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::rx
[   17.893587] rtl8187: wireless switch is on
[   17.893643] usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8187

But still not working, I'm like at first.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Did you perform the other steps indicated in the Gentoo Wiki article? Once you get the message "usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8187" from dmesg, there are other steps to perform, and they are given in that article.

[vladder]

These are the steps I followed:
modprobe rtl8187
dmesg | grep rtl8187
wlan4 ifconfig up
I understand that it should work perfectly, so I did not add the module to the boot sequence. My intention is to do when I get it to work.
Only I had to do "modprobe rtl8187 force_card = 0x8187" ...

[Fitzcarraldo]

Only I had to do "modprobe rtl8187 force_card = 0x8187" ...

So you have the RTL8187B wireless controller, rather than the RTL8178 wireless controller?

Also do the following to disconnect wlan0 in case it is interfering.

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# ifconfig wlan0 down

Also, try:

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# /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 stop
# /etc/init.d/net.wlan4 restart

Following that, try using nm-applet (your GNOME network management GUI) to establish a connection to wlan4.

By the way, why do you have wlan0 and wlan4? What are wlan1, wlan2 and wlan3?

Have a look in the file /etc/conf.d/net to see if wlan4 is mentioned. If not, try editing that and changing "wlan0" to "wlan4".

Also try the following to generate new IP address leases from your DHCP server (I'm assuming you're using DHCP rather than static IP addressing?):

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# dhclient wlan4

What does the following return?

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# iwlist scan

understand that it should work perfectly, so I did not add the module to the boot sequence

That's correct. You don't need to configure the module to be loaded automatically at boot until you are sure everything is working. Of course, until you do that, you'll need to load it manually every time you boot. By the way, that Gentoo Wiki article assumes Baselayout-1, whereas SL uses Baselayout-2/OpenRC, so, to load the module automatically at boot, you would need to add it to the file /etc/conf.d/modules rather than the file /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 stated in the article.