|
Table of Contents
|
Bill Giannikos (Home Page)
Fedora 13 does not support either the Realtek 8172 or 8192se as standard. This guide will help you add support for these wireless controllers to your system.
These are not the best drivers ever written and may exhibit problems (such as dropouts) from time to time. If you are having issues you may like to periodically check if newer drivers have been released and install those.
For Realtek 8172 owners, while this guide talk about using the 8192se driver it works for the 8172 as well.
You should run a full update for your installation of Fedora to ensure you have all the latest packages installed. You should also restart your computer after installing updates before continuing on with this guide.
Here are the steps in installing the Realtek drivers.
1. Open a web browser and head to the Realtek 8192se driver page. From here you need to download the latest Linux driver. At the time of writing this was 0017 so we will use that version in this guide, your file name and folder created will be slightly different than the one below if you downloaded a different version.
2. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
3. Switch to the root user with:
su -
You will be asked for your root password.
4. Type in the following to install gcc and the kernel headers:
yum install gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers patch make
5. Move to the /usr/src/ folder with:
cd /usr/src
6. Now extract the contents of the file you downloaded with the following command (make sure to replace /path/to/ to the actual path you downloaded the file to):
sudo tar xzvf /path/to/rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0017.0705.2010.tar.gz
7. Move into the newly created folder with
cd rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0017.0705.2010
8. Lets copy across the required firmware with this command:
cp -rf firmware/RTL8192SE /lib/firmware
9. Now lets build the driver:
make
You may get an error at this stage depending on your kernel. Don't worry about it, the stuff we need is compiled.
10. These set of drivers contain a whole lot of rubbish we don't need, so we only want to copy the driver module itself. Use the following two commands to install the driver:
cp HAL/rtl8192/r8192se_pci.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/ depmod -a
11. Optionally, you may like to delete the driver folder now, use the following command:
rm -rf /usr/src/rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0017.0705.2010
12. Reboot your computer and your realtek wireless controller should begin to work.
Please note that if Fedora release an updated kernel you will have to go through the above steps again but make sure you skip the copying of the firmware.
Discussion