WPA Working Smoothly on Ubuntu Intrepid ( 8.10 )

It is a nightmare to wait for the new release of Ubuntu 8.10 for me. Plus I accidentally crashed my old Ubuntu 8.10 by mistyping a rm command. So there's no reason why shouldn't I install alpha 6 version of Intrepid several days earlier than the plan. What thrilled my is that I found the wireless card of my Gateway T-1616, which is an rtl8187b, is working perfectly for a WPA wireless network. The weird inexplainable behaver before, such as connects to a WPA wireless signal and then works on a strength of 0%, are all gone! What's better, I can really use the new-human theme for a while!

Full Functioning Gateway T-1616 ( rtl8187b ) with Ubuntu 8.04 and Later

As questions about rtl8187b wireless card (of Gateway T-1616) + Ubuntu 8.04 accumulating here, I figured that it is time to make a reply. My answer is: I don't know how to make it work. Despite the fact that Ubuntu 8.04 is the only OS on my Gateway T-1616 and almost everything is working healthily, wireless included. To get that: Install a Linux Mint, you will find yourself being able to install a working windows driver for rtl8187b with ndiswrapper. Then change your /etc/apt/sources.list into the same as a normal Ubuntu hardy one, update & upgrade everything. The wireless then will still work, so will be other stuff. And if you don't like the look & feel of Mint, go ahead and read Full Circle Issue 16: GNOME-Look Guide. It does an excellent job telling us how to change the look of everything on ubuntu. The only blemish of this approach is that the mic of Gateway T-1616 wouldn't work.

Linux Mint Working on Gateway T1616

The idea of the Ubuntu - Based distro Linux Mint is to make things work easier. But for the users of linux-unfriendly Gateway T1616 users, which includes me, things are always a little more complicated than it suppose to be. And Linux Mint is not an exception. Here's how I made this distro work to meet my basic requirements.

1. Video Card This turned out to be the easiest step. After the installation, there was a notification on the taskbar asking me to use a restricted dirver. I checked that driver and Linux Mint downloaded and installed the ATI accelerated graphics driver automatically. After this, I rebooted the laptop and got the video card working perfectly.
2. Wireless Card As I've wrote in another post, I download RTL8187B driver for Windows, unpack it. There were the rtl8187b driver for windows 98 as well as other windows versions on their own folder. I went to Daryna-Administrations-Windows Wireless Drivers , Clicked "Install", found the .ini file in the folder for the rtl8187b driver of windows 98, clicked OK. Then the wireless card started working. One thing to recommend is, the default network-manager in Linux Mint (Ubuntu) is a little dull in detecting the wireless signals. Usually it doesn't match the result of "lwlist scan". And wicd is the solution. Go to Daryna-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager. Choose Settings-Repositories, press the button New. Fill in the text area like this: URL: http://apt.wicd.net/ Distribution: gutsy Section(s): extras And then press OK. And you will be able to install wicd with synaptic (sudo aptitude install wicd). When you do that, you'll find network-manager removed automatically. Don't panic, you can install it back whenever you like. To finish the installation of wicd, you need to go to Daryna-Preference-Sessions, Press Add, Fill in name with Wicd, Command with /opt/wicd/tray.py, and fill in Comment with anything you like. Next time you start gnome, you will find wicd in the taskbar at start.
3. Sound Card It took me quite a while to search with Google, and the result is unexpectedly simple. All you need is type the following command in a terminal:

   sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-generic

   I doubt that this works with Ubuntu , too.
4. Webcam For the scarce of webcam application on linux, I haven't found a universal way to fully drive the built-in webcam up. But it works properly for skype 2.0 by default. Which, according to my previous test on Ubuntu, indicates that it works with kopete, too.

Having all this done, I've got this laptop working with Linux Mint. But there's still a problem. Sometime when restarted, the system stops in the middle of the whole process forever. To "restart" it, I need to turn the machine down and start it again. Do you have the same problem with Linux Mint & Gateway T1616?

Linux Mint 4.0 + ndiswrapper works on Gateway T1616: rtl8187b

This is an instruction to new Linux Mint users who have a Gateway T1616 Laptop, if you are using Ubuntu and the wireless doesn't work, you may want to try Native Linux Driver for RTL8187B. "Linux Mint is an Ubuntu - based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. It also adds a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, and a web-based package installation interface. Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories." Gateway T1616, which is not a very linux-friendly laptop, has the wireless card RTL8187b. I found that it is very easy to make the wireless work out of the box with Linux Mint 4.0 . First, you need to download the RTL8187B driver for Windows. Notice that there are several drivers in the package, and the one for windows 98 works just fine. So uncompress that to some where on the disk. Then you install the driver with ndiswrapper, which is in the system by default. To be specific, go to Daryna-Administrations-Windows Wireless Drivers. Click on "Install" button, choose the path where you unpacked the Win98 driver, and you will find the .inf file highlighted, click OK. Now you should have the wireless working properly. If there are wireless signals around, you should be able to find them listed by clicking the network reminder on the right of the taskbar. You may also try iwconfig in a terminal and you should find wlan0 up and running. The last thing to do is to add ndiswrapper to a new line in the start-up module list, which is in /etc/modules And that's when you start enjoying wireless.

rtl8187b linux native driver works on Ubuntu

Update: This essay is really sort of outdated. Nevertheless I has not been keeping track on this native driver. One good approach to get things work is to use a more "wrapped" distro, where ndiswrapper + windows driver works. And then "upgrade" it into the original distro you desired by changing the repository settings or whatever. For those who desire Ubuntu, I recommend Linux Mint. I used to try getting rtl8187b wireless card work on ubuntu by using ndiswrapper,everything seemed fine with this method except that it WASN't ACTURALLY WORKING. What happened was, iwconfig said that there's a wlan0,iwlist scan did find several signal around -- but they never change.It seems that the wireless card only worked when the machine started up, when it discovered something by then and kept returning it to me later. Things were the same when I use the graphic interface, of course. I turned to #ubuntu@irc.ubuntu.org for help and met Word1983. He gave me a page from google, from which I traced to this modified driver for rtl8187b. Here're several steps to drive rtl8187b up with this driver: 1 downland the driver. 2 extract it to a folder.Since we will keep this folder,you'd better choose a good place for it.

tar xzvf rtl8187b-modified-dist.tar.gz -C GoooPlace/ cd GoodPlace

3 run the script makedrv with sudo.Don't panic on those compiler warnings,as long as you don't see anything like "error", the driver might not have been nice coded, but it will work.

sudo ./makedrv

4 run the other script wlan0up with sudo

sudo ./wlan0up

If nothing went wrong, you should find a wlanX in the result of iwconfig,in case you may have tried to get the rtl8187b wireless card worked, X varies from 0 to ?.

iwconfig

Then you may go

iwlist scan

The card will detect signals surrounded then.Which means that it started working properly. PS:You need to run sudo wlan0up everytime you need wireless.You may want to make a shortcut for it on your desktop or home folder.