Mean-Machine@home:~$

Wireless [rtl8187b] on Toshiba A200-1V0 [Ubuntu 8.04]

Posted in GNU/Linux, Ubuntu by Mean-Machine on May 15, 2008

I tried quite a few methods and drivers before. Unfortunately none of them worked for me.
Because I’m using the Huawei e220 USB Modem and didn’t really need the wireless that urgently, I gave up for a while.

Today I’ve decided to give it another go and started searching for ‘new’ methods/solutions/drivers in ubuntuforums. I found one that worked for me and hope that it will also work for you, if you haven’t fixed it already ;-]

This HowTo was originally posted in ubuntuforums by pana.corbului

First you have to be sure that your wireless card is using the rtl 8187b chipset. You can check this by issueing lsusb command in console

octav@toshiba:~$ lsusb
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 003: ID 04d9:0499 Holtek Semiconductor, Inc.
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Next, you’ll install ndiswrapper which is a software for using Windows wireless drivers with Linux, if the current linux kernel doesn´t support a certain device.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

Stop the network

sudo /etc/init.d/networking stop

Download driver from here and save it to your deskop and install it using ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper -i ~/Desktop/net8187b.inf

Check if it was properly installed

sudo ndiswrapper -l

The output should be something like net8187b : driver installed device (0BDA:8197) present;

If there were no erros you can build kernel module

sudo ndiswrapper -m
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

Start networking

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Activate wireless interface from laptop’s switch.

Hope it’s working for you already.

When trying to install the driver with ndiswrapper you get this kind of message:

couldn't find "RTL8187B.sys" in "/home/Desktop"; make sure all driver files, including .inf, .sys (and any firmware files) are in "/home/Desktop" -
installation may be incomplete

then you’ll need to download this RTL8187B.sys file from here and save it to the same location as the rtl8187b.inf. Now install the driver again and continue with the next steps.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Tagged with: , , , ,
5 comments

5 Responses

Subscribe to comments with RSS.

  1. Roxette said, on May 31, 2008 at 12:25 am

    Ndiswrapper said: Invalid driver!

    Reply
  2. dade said, on June 5, 2008 at 11:52 pm

    For me it’t the same…

    Invalid driver!

    What’s wrong the output of lsusb gives

    Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek

    Reply
  3. dade said, on June 6, 2008 at 12:02 am

    ok I got it

    If you got the error about RTL8187B.sys file you must first remove the already installed .inf with

    sudo rm -rf /etc/ndiswrapper/net8187b

    then install again .inf with .sys downloaded
    ndiswrapper -i ~/Desktop/net8187b.inf

    Reply
  4. betobetoman said, on July 5, 2008 at 9:46 pm

    Into ndiswrapper says hardware present: yes, but in the network manager it just doesn’t appear, i followed every step carefully, but my wireless still doesn’t work.

    P. S. The driver is the one which comes into the “windous” vista partition, i mean the driver which works on vista.

    Thanks a lot. I hope someone could help me.

    Reply
  5. zerp64 said, on July 20, 2008 at 10:40 am

    Tried this out. Ndiswrapper now says that my wireless card is not detected. Therefore I cannot continue.

    PLEASE get back to me, if possible. I need help.

    Reply

Leave a Reply