Cardbus and USB adapters for VL6 Light

[fh67]

Hi,

I've just installed VL6 Light on an old Dell Latitude CPx laptop - 500MHz PIII, 128MB RAM, 12GB HDD. The Cardbus WLAN is an ADDON GWK150v2 and the chipset is Realtek 8185 54m. Has anyone ever got this chipset to work with Linux? I tried several distros before settling on VL but couldn't get the card to connect on any of them.

I followed the tutorial here: http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=1282.0 and VL recognised the card as a Realtek 8180, but only on eth0. I tried the various steps outlined to add the alias wlan options. That didn't work so I then tried the ndiswrapper options and altered wpa_suplicant.conf - but still have had no joy.

My card detects wireless networks in my area, reports their signal strengths (very erratically) and Wicd Manager gets as far a 'validating authentication' but gets no further. The wpa-psk entry is correct.

So, can I get this chipset to work or should I buy another card or a USB adapter that works properly? I live in the UK, so if anyone can recommend an inexpensive one that does work without any hassle, I'd be very grateful.

Thanks.

FH67

[abdul.jones]

just to let you know, I too have a realtek chipped card (belkin) and I did what you did- tried linux drivers and then ndiswrapper and got crap signal and flakey performance, until I finally lost the signal altogether. Then I was reading something (sorry can't remember what) which mentioned having to put the linux drivers on the blacklist so the system knows which ones to use. Being a newbie, this was a bit scary, but I had a go (what was the worse that could happen?!) and at the moment, my internet connection is fine.