Installing a Realtek RTL8185 wireless card

Published: February 25, 2008

In this post I explain how I made my wireless card with a Realtek RTL8185 chipset work in Slackware GNU/Linux.

I recently moved to a new apartment and the Internet modem had to be placed in the bedroom, separate from the living room where I have my workstation, so I had to choose between buying a wireless card for my pc or drilling a hole through the wall to slip in an ethernet cable.

Since I don’t have a drill, and my wife wouldn’t have liked a cable going through the middle of the makeup mirror, I got an Encore Electronics Wireless-G PCI Adapter (ENLWI-G2). Actually this is just a card with a Realtek RTL8185 chipset on it, and you can get the Linux drivers from the Realtek website.

Building the modules and testing

I have to warn you that I had my PC crash a few times while experimenting with the wireless settings, so be patient and be prepared to hit the power button.

Download and extract the appropriate *.tar.gz file from the Realtek website, you will find instructions on how to build and load the modules in the readme file. Basically you have to:

Run the file makedrv to build the modules from the source code.
Run the file wlan0up to load the modules into the running kernel.

This is where I encountered the first problem, for some reason the last line in the wlan0up script (ifconfig wlan0 up) made my computer crash. After rebooting I commented out that line and tried again, no problem was found and I saw that the wlan0 interface was already up anyway (run ifconfig to see the interfaces that are up).

These modules are not going to be loaded automatically at boot up yet, we’ll see how to do that later.
The third step after the wireless interface is up is to configure your wireless link settings and getting an IP address, see the readme file to get the details.

In my case I only needed these two commands to set up the wireless link to the router.

iwconfig wlan0 essid "Megadeth"
iwconfig wlan0 key abcd123456

My wireless LAN name is “Megadeth” and it uses WEP encryption in Open security mode. Yes, I know that WEP is practically useless for security, but I have other devices that only talk WEP.

After setting the wireless link I had to run this command to get an ip address from the router:

dhcpcd -t 20 wlan0

I did NOT run the wlan0dhcp file that was provided in the tarball as it appears to be RedHat specific, or something like that, I really don’t know, but I know for sure that it wouldn’t work in Slackware.

Making the modules load at boot up

The next step was to figure out how to have the modules loaded up when the computer starts.

One option is to leave the compiled modules where they are (or move it wherever you want) and load them up by putting these instructions at the end of the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules-XYZ script where XYZ is the version of the kernel that the modules were built for:

/sbin/insmod /root/rtl8185/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt-rtl.ko
/sbin/insmod /root/rtl8185/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt_wep-rtl.ko
/sbin/insmod /root/rtl8185/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt_tkip-rtl.ko
/sbin/insmod /root/rtl8185/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt_ccmp-rtl.ko
/sbin/insmod /root/rtl8185/ieee80211/ieee80211-rtl.ko
/sbin/insmod /root/rtl8185/rtl8185/r8180.ko

The /root/rtl8185/ folder is where I unpacked and built the modules.

The second option, which is the one I prefer, is to move the modules to the appropriate kernel directories so that you don’t clutter your root folder.

But before that you should know that the ieee80211 modules that are built from this package are intended as a replacement for the ieee80211 stack that comes with the kernel. This means that you have to move out the original ieee80211 stack to avoid having them loaded into the kernel. This might not be strictly necessary since the modules have different names, but I wasn’t using the original stack and I didn’t see any need for it so I moved them out just as a precaution, as having both stacks loaded would have caused a conflict.

# Back up the original stack.
cd /lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/net
mv ieee80211 /root/ieee80211_original_stack

# Move the new modules there.
# we are at /lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/net
mkdir ieee80211
cp /root/rtl8185/ieee80211/*.ko ieee80211/

# Finally move the r8180.ko module too.
cd /lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
cp /root/rtl8185/rtl8185/r8180.ko .

# Update module dependencies.
depmod -ae

The last command, depmod -ae, updates a file /lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/modules.dep which indicates the dependencies for each module. If you inspect that file you’ll see that the r8180 module depends on the ieee80211_rtl and ieee80211_crypt_rtl modules; indeed, if you reboot and type lsmod you’ll see that these modules are loaded.

r8180
ieee80211_rtl
ieee80211_crypt_rtl

However, there are three additional modules that need to be loaded too:

ieee80211_crypt_wep-rtl
ieee80211_crypt_tkip-rtl
ieee80211_crypt_ccmp-rtl

Without these modules you won’t be able to set encryption keys for your wireless link. These are not being loaded because no module depends on them. To change that we have to edit the modules.dep file and edit the line that specifies the dependencies of the r8180 module, the format of a modules.dep entry is:

/path/to/module_a.ko: /path/to/module2.ko /path/to/module1.ko

Which means that module_a.ko depends on module1.ko and module2.ko. The modules are loaded from right to left, which means that module1 is loaded first, followed by module2 and finally module_a last.

So then, open up the modules.dep file and search for the line where the dependencies of the r8180 are defined and change it so that all the necessary modules are loaded.

Here I break the line into multiple lines so that you can read it easily, but make sure it is only one whole line, so please pay attention. Also, the order is important, so pay double attention.

I repeat, this must be one single line in your modules.dep file:

/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/r8180.ko:
/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/net/ieee80211/ieee80211-rtl.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/net/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt_ccmp-rtl.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/net/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt_tkip-rtl.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/net/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt_wep-rtl.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/net/ieee80211/ieee80211_crypt-rtl.ko

After you reboot you’ll see that all the modules have been loaded up.

Setting the wireless link and getting an IP at boot up

The final step is to set your wireless essid and key and get an ip from the router when your computer boots up.

Since I run Slackware, the place to define ip settings is the file /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf - the relevant lines in my settings file are:

...
IFNAME[4]="wlan0"
USE_DHCP[4]="yes"
DHCP_TIMEOUT[4]=30
WLAN_ESSID[4]=Megadeth
WLAN_KEY[4]="abcd123456 open"
...

There are a few things to notice here.

I added the variable DHCP_TIMEOUT, this is because the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 script executes an ifconfig wlan0 up if that variable is not defined (look around line 117), and I don’t know why, but for some reason sometimes that makes my computer freeze.

This is strange because the rc.wireless script also executes this command but I have not found any problem with it, it seems that the card doesn’t like to be “upped” so many times.

For the WLAN_ESSID variable you’ll type your wireless LAN name without quotes.

You’ll notice that the WLAN_KEY contains the word open, this is because if you don’t specify either open or restricted the /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless script will set the key to restricted mode by default. In my case I wanted it to be in open security mode.

One last thing that is important, the /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless script sets a nick option on the wireless settings, but this driver does not support that option and it will throw an error. Open that file and comment out that line, look around line 184, i.e.:

if [ ! -n "$NICKNAME" ] ; then
    NICKNAME=`/bin/hostname`
fi
if [ -n "$ESSID" -o -n "$MODE" ] ; then
    echo "$0:  $IWCOMMAND nick $NICKNAME" | $LOGGER
    # $IWCOMMAND nick $NICKNAME <-- this is not supported
fi

And that’s it, try running /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 stop and then /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 start.

You’ll notice that this line is printed on the screen:

./rc.wireless:  wlan0 information: 'Any ESSID...'

If it bothers you, you can edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf file and comment out the lines from line number 38 to 41 and you won’t see that message anymore.

Or, you can change the INFO variable to something else. I’m more nostalgic and so I changed it to a quote from an old song I like:

## --------- START SECTION TO REMOVE -----------
## Pick up any Access Point, should work on most 802.11 cards
*)
    INFO="The warheads will all rust in peace"
    ESSID="Megadeth"
    ;;
## ---------- END SECTION TO REMOVE ------------

It’s not necessary to put the ESSID here as it is overridden by what you set on the rc.inet1.conf file.

If things get really nasty….

If you screwed it with the wireless settings and you can’t get your pc to boot up normally because the driver crashes it, you can boot up in single user mode (also called emergency mode). When you boot up your computer and get the LILO prompt, select your Linux installation and type the word single after the label.

In single user mode no networking configurations will be set up at all so that you can edit your settings and try again.

Enjoy…