RTL8187B wireless networking (Fedora 11) issue.

[terrywallwork]

Hello,

I have been using Fedora 10 for a while with the Wireless USB2 RTL8187B driver. And although when Fedora 10 first came out it did not work, eventually Fedora 10 added the support for it and it worked flawlessly.

So, I decided knowing that the wireless card worked in Fedora 10 to move over to Fedora 11. When I did this (using preupgrade method). I could not get any wireless.

ifconfig showed all the correct details but iwconfig showed that my wireless router was not associating with the device.

Has anyone else had this regression problem with F11 with the RTL8187B driver.

I am on a laptop (Toshiba Satelite L350).

I had to switch back to F10 until this issue is fixed (which I am writing this message on so I cant give lsusb, lsmod and lspci info or iwconfig for F11. But the module for RTL8187 was loaded in F11 but no router association.



Thanks in advance.

[assen]

Hi,

I have an RTL8187 USB dongle, which worked more or less fine with F10 (at least at lower speed; auto-negotiation of data rate never really worked, but doing am "iwconfig wlan0 rate 11M" usually did the trick).

However, I can confirm that even a clean install of F11 its perfirmance is very poor - high packet loss, frequent reconnects, can't even launch a VPN over it -- and the iwconfig magic does not help any more.

Any ideas what went that wrong between 2.6.27 and 2.6.29 kernels? Or something else did?

WWell,

[terrywallwork]

Just a quick update. Went back and did it the old fashioned way (see way I should of done it in the first place). Rather than using preupgrade, I downloaded the full iso dvd and did and install that way. As a result wireless is now working out of the box. I can't say how stable it is yet but at least its working (so far). Also noticed that preupgrade selected .586 kernel. But the Iso install correctly selected the new PAE/686 kernals.

So it could have been a combinations of issues. Anyways Im just glad its works. That definitely that last time I try to take a shortcut and save time by using preupgrade. Iso's all the way for me in furture!

[assen]

Hi,

Looks like I've found a workaround for the rtl8187 problem on F11. On F10, iwconfig properly sets the transmission power (txpower) to 27 dBm (500 mW) and therefore the device works more or less as expected. On F11, the txpower is by default set to only 20 dBm (100 mW or 5 times lower) and the connection is very poor. Issuing a command like

iwconfig wlan0 txpower 27

helps a lot. However, here comes another bug: while iwconfig displayed the txpower properly in F10, in F11 whatever value you give it, it still claims it is only 20 dBm. The only way to tell the difference is by the fact that that connection now works properly.... and the USB adapter heats up as it did in F10.

WWell,

[terrywallwork]

Hi,

Did some checking and its the same on my laptop also txpower 20dBm.

I guess my first question would be is this a bug or is it a standard requirement or something?

My router is very close to my laptop so it worked with the lower settings but if further away I can imagine it giving drop outs.

The other question I have is at the moment to make iwconfig respect the 27dBm setting I have to login to root and manually configure iwconfig to the new settings. Is there anyway to get network manager to pass along different settings. I use network manager with static ip addresses (ie not chosen by dhcp).

I know I can do it with a boot script or something but I would like to keep network manager in charge if at all possible