well, it was working but not really as it should.
found some posts where people was saying on windows the card was flawless but on *nix with the native nix drivers it was slow.
So. i made a little 15g partition and installed win xp on it. installed the card drivers. sure enough card was flawless.
downloading a 20MB file.
Linux (VL,Ubuntu,Mint,Debian didnt matter) fastest d/l speed i got was between 30kb/s and 100kb/s
Windows XP same file, d/l speed from 400kb/s to 1.2MB/s
seems no matter the native *nix driver (one came with the card, one auto loaded in kernel or the link posted above) all the same, very slow d/l speeds and after some time it will just die and have to reconnect to AP.
anyway, hooked up my server installed ubuntu 10.04 on it. blacklisted the rtl8187 drivers from loading in kernel. installed ndiswrapper, and used ndiswrapper to wrap the rt win xp driver. with using ndiswrapper, the same 20MB file i get d/l speeds between 100kb/s to 500kb/s not as good as under XP, but its not horrible slow its eh tolerable.
ended up installing dhcp server on the server, and packet forwarding wlan0 to eth0 so this VL KDE3 tower has internet along with the ubuntu server. (plus doing some php/website work its just easier to install apache/php/mysql/phpmyadmin under ubuntu)
all in all, it seems the rtl8187 linux driver needs alot more work.