Belkin F5D7000 problems with ndiswrapper

Message

Mark Clegg · Post by **Mark Clegg** » Sun Feb 03, 2008 6:12 pm

I'm using a Belkin F5D7000 pci wireless card, (PCI ID 1799:700f) which is based on the RTL8185 chipset.

At the moment, there doesn't appear to be any native drivers for this card, so I'm having to use ndiswrapper, but it seems a little tempremental.

On boot, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

In the cases where it doesn't, running...

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/etc/init.d/net.wlan0 stop
rmmod ndiswrapper
modprobe ndiswrapper

...generally gets it going (although sometimes that needs repeating a couple of times), and then it will be fine, although sometimes I need to repeat that again an hour later as it suddenly drops off again.

I've been watching the rtl-wifi project, which supports the rtl8185 chipset, and also note that native support has recently been added to the kernel, but only for the USB variant, and my card is PCI.

I'm currently using ...

gentoo-sources-2.6.23-r6
ndiswrapper-1.51
wpa_supplicant-0.5.7 (configured for WPA-PSK2)
blkwgdv7 (drivers from the cards supplied driver CD)

Has anybody successfully managed to get this card working reliably?

qweldryk · Post by **qweldryk** » Mon Feb 04, 2008 10:18 pm

Yes, it works reliably for me. However, the s/w support is variable:

1/ Native linux support:

A native linux driver for rtl8180/8185 devices _is_ currently in development and the pci device (1799:700f) you refer to is supported. However, note that there is currently less apparent development interest in the rtl8180/8185 side of things than in devices based on some other chipsets.

The source is included both in the latest kernel stable snapshots, e.g. 2.6.24-git13 (search for 'rtl8180' or '1799:700f' in
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/ ... -git13.log), as well as in the wireless-2.6 git kernel, cf. http://linuxwireless.org. There is also the option of the bolt-on 'compat-wireless' stack as also described at http://linuxwireless.org but personally I've not had much (read _any_) success with that.

I can't comment on the state of the driver in the stable kernel git snapshots as these are currently not bootable on my system

Also, the rtl8180 driver in the most recent wireless-2.6 git kernel I tried (git tag be338637e83b2ae335d68a271a13d77b570931fe) is broken as a result of changes to the underlying mac80211 wireless stack - see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ke ... eral/10772 and references. But, who knows, it might be fixed any time soon ...

I am currently using a version of the wireless-2.6 git kernel (git tag b5d05d7f35ff9317c45159369b2c60549a15fbe6) which pre-dates the recent mac80211 changes and which works really well (also, my only option under x86_64). If you decide to try this and it's still available (it's based on 2.6.24-rc8) you'll need to edit the file drivers/net/wireless/rtl8180_dev.c and include a line adding support for 1799:700f as it predates explicit support for this device.

2/ Binary drivers via ndiswrapper

I have used these successfully on a 32-bit system with ndiswrapper (0.51) but not on 64-bit where ndiswrapper (same version) crashed on modprobe.

For the 32-bit system I used both the Belkin (blkwgdv7) drivers and 'generic' net8185 drivers from Realtek (with an appropriate ndiswrapper alias) with equal success.

However, you might care to unmask wpa_supplicant and try using 0.6.1 instead, which worked better for me than the then current versions in the stable (0.5.x) tree.

Adrian Bassett

Mark Clegg · Post by **Mark Clegg** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 6:59 pm

Many Thanks Adrian, very comprehensive reply.

I'll give the 2.6.24-rc8 git sources you mentioned a try.

Mark Clegg · Post by **Mark Clegg** » Sun Feb 10, 2008 11:52 am

I've just installed the 2.6.24-git21 sources from kernel.org, and can confirm that it's working just great.

Many thanks for the help.

gentunian · Post by **gentunian** » Mon Jul 07, 2008 2:44 pm

Mark Clegg wrote:I've just installed the 2.6.24-git21 sources from kernel.org, and can confirm that it's working just great.

Many thanks for the help.

hi there,

are you using amd64? or just x86?

I have purchased this device:

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01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8185 IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 20)
	Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8185 IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Controller
	Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
	I/O ports at d800 [size=256]
	Memory at fbfffc00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
	Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

It's an edimax (the seller said that was a 7128G, but wireless.org says that the G variant uses ralink chipset) so maybe it's a 7126.

Regards,

Mark Clegg · Post by **Mark Clegg** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 2:44 pm

I'm running x86. I'm also now using gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r4 (which is ~x86), and haven't had a single problem with it.

gentunian · Post by **gentunian** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:43 pm

Mark Clegg wrote:I'm running x86. I'm also now using gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r4 (which is ~x86), and haven't had a single problem with it.

Hi, thanks for reply I forgotten this thread. I emerged the 2.6.25-gentoo-r6 in amd64 and then compiled with wireless support for that chip. It's working fine.

Thanks,