Installing wireless drivers for RTL8197b-based chipsets

(Particularly those with USB ID 0bda:8198)

I've used a few different methods for this over the last few months. This page documents using Johnny Cuervo's driver, and using the 2.6.27-7 kernel driver provided with ubuntu 8.10.

Johnny Cuervo's driver

(Thanks to Johnny Cuervo for pointing out the force_card parameter in his patch. This made the guide much simpler. You can still find the old version here.)

I tried using the ubuntu guide to RTL8187b family wireless cards to get my wireless on my Toshiba Satellite Pro L300, but it failed at one key step.

The problem is that the modified driver available from Johnny Cuervo's site only accepts chipsets with USB ID 0bda:8189 or 8197 as reported bylsusb. The output from mine is:

Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0bda:8198 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

As you can see, 8198 is a different ID which isn't recognised by the driver. However, you can use the force_card module parameter to force your card to be treated as one of the cards that the driver recognises. In theory, you should be able to fix this problem by supplying force_card=0x8189 to the module. Follow the ubuntu guide, but use

wlan0up force_card=0x8189

to bring the wireless driver up. The driver should work a treat.

Warning: I have not tested this. I got my wireless working using the old guide, linked at the top. In theory, this should have the same effect without having to hack the source code of the driver. But I take no responsibility if it results in hardware damage or any other loss.

2.6.27 kernel driver

This could work as far back as kernel 2.6.23 because that's how long the mac80211-based rtl8187 driver has been part of the kernel; however I've only tried this with 2.6.27. The 2.6.27 rtl8187b driver does not work out of the box with 0bda:8198 cards.

Similar to Johnny Cuervo's driver above, it only supports 8187, 8189, and 8197, but unfortunately it doesn't provide a handy force_card option. As a result I had to hack the source code to make the driver work with the card. I make no guarantee that this will work and warn you that using this method may result in hardware damage. I don't know that the 8198 has the same interface as all the other cards in the family, but I can tell you that it works fine with mine.

I posted my solution to the problem to the rtl-wifi forums at sourceforge. If you can work it out from my sparse guide there, great; if not, drop me an email and I'll help you out and update this page to make it easier to read.

Finally, with this driver I experienced very short operating range. This thread explains the problem and solution. It seems that the driver always attempts to achieve the highest bitrate even when errors are occurring, which results in awful quality and sometimes all connections will timeout.

I fixed this by setting the bitrate lower manually with:

iwconfig wlan0 rate 5.5M fixed

After this command I could once again access the network from the next room.

Philip Potter, 30th September 2008