Linksys WPC11 v4 How-to

[tecwizrd]

I was listening to the episode the other day, where Pat was talking about installing Linux on a laptop for a lady. He stated that he had to use ndiswrapper to get the Linksys card to work.

I thought I would post a How-to for the card using open source drivers from sourceforge. This is for the version 4 cards (the only one sold a WalMart and Target) that use Realtek 818x chipsets.

1. Get the drivers from sourceforge using cvs. (better support for some features)

A. cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rtl8180-sa2400 login

B. cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rtl8180-sa2400 co -P rtl8180-sa2400-dev

2. cd to the rtl8180-sa2400-dev dir.

A. as root (sudo in ubuntu) load the arc4 module (modprobe arc4)

B. type make

C. run the provided script module_load (module_load24 for 2.4 kernels)

1. You may need to change the first line of the script for your system.
i.e change #!/bin/env bash to #!/bin/bash. (this is only for the 2.6
kernel script)

D. Do an (ifconfig wlan0 up) to wake the card

E. Do an iwconfig wlan0 essid (AP name (i.e. linksys) use iwlist scan to
figure out essid of AP.

F. If you are using dhcp then do a dhclient wlan0 or dhcpcd wlan0

depending on your system. If not using dhcp then set the card up as
you would a eth0 card using ifconfig.

If you need wep support or your AP the use iwconfig wlan0 key (insert key here). I f your AP requires the card to have the AP MAC address the use iwconfig wlan0 ap (AP mac address).

You can set the modules to load at boot but pay close attention to the order you load them, the way they are done in the script is the order they need to be loaded. Once the modules are loaded you should be able to use one of the wifi utilities to set the card up. (i.e. wlassistant).

Older versions of this card use the prism (and maybe broadcom) chipsets, there are instructions around the net to use these cards. The ones using prism2 chipsets should be auto detected by most systems,

I haven't had too many problems with this method. Make sure you load arc4 first because the drivers need it present to build the crypt modules.