Problems with Airlink 101 Golden N on Fedora 13

[alexduan]

Trying to get my Airlink 101 Golden N (AWLL6075) to work with Fedora 13. Was trying to follow this guide here, but I'm still getting a link is not ready problem. Also, tried a solution that seems to work on Ubuntu found here, but nada again. I'm pretty new to Linux so please be gentle.

[itisspeedy]

I have the same problem. It is not only with Airlink101 Golden N, but with all Realtek chipsets of this generation. There is no support for them. It turnes out that Ubuntu has support and you only need the firmware, which I happen to have. It worked like a charm. You would expect Fedora as more advanced distribution to have a support for such a gray market item as usual, but NOOOO...

I don't know what the reason for not having this driver in the kernel is, but I refuse to use ndiswrapper, so I will boot into my Ubuntu (which I hate BTW) till this issue is resolved.

[22over7]

I managed to get this dongle going.

It involved installing the kernel sources, downloading stuff from RealTek, and a bit of command line stuff. If this is not for you, give up now, and wait for fedora or someone to make it easier.

First, find RTL8191SU_usb_linux_v2.6.0006.20100601.zip, and download it
to ~/Downloads. (A later version may be better.)
I got it by drilling down in the Realtek site. It can also be found on the web.

Then, sudo yum install gcc kernel-PAE-devel kernel-headers patch make.
This should equip you with the magic to install driver code.
(If you are using PAE!)

Then do something like: unzip ~/Downloads/RTL..ditto..zip. Somewhere in here
you will find a tar.gz file. Go to the directory it is in, and untar it. Go into
the directory and type make. If everything seems ok, type sudo make install.

Now go to some folder up a little, and nearby, called firmware. sudo cp -a the single
directory in it into /lib/firmware, ie
sudo cp -a firmware/* /lib/firmware.

Probably do a sudo /sbin/depmod -a.

By a process of iterating through the above, or something close to it, and
rebooting from time to time, you will wind up at a point that if you plug the
dongle in, it will be recognised, and the firmware loaded into it. It should
now show up if you type "iwconfig" as wlan0, or something that wasn't there
before.

Now it is just a matter of persuading the thing to connect to your favourite
wireless network. I forget how I did this, but probably it was just a matter
of using my window manager's network gizmo.

I'm sorry to be imprecise -- it's not an experience I want to remember -- but
I just wanted to reassure you that with an hour or two's persistence, and average
googling skills, it can be made to work. The trickiest part is getting the driver
to compile, which is google-able voodoo.

You have to go through this nonsense whenever you update your kernel.

I hope that's of some interest.

[itisspeedy]

Thanks very much for your reply. My frustration came from the fact that it is Fedora 13 already and still we have to deal with such long going through hoops to make something so simple work.

I am tired already of trying to make solutions, which already exist, so I am going to wait. It has been too long for me going back and forth and compiling kernels or modules -- simply no more time for this.

Your method, though strange seems to be working, but it is bound to a process of repeated compiling of the module and eventually a kernel will come that this source will not be compatible and there we go again.

Thanks!