I’ve been playing with PCI and USB Wireless LAN card/adapter lately and I admit i have gotten myself into trouble setting up the USB Wireless LAN adapter.
I have mentioned it here in this post
that it worked without hitch in Ubuntu Feisty using its stock kernel, so i am testing the adapter again but this time, using a Fedora 6 distro which has
2.6.18-x (stock) kernel version, and the fun starts here.

Note: The USB Wireless LAN Adapter uses RTL8187 (Realtek) chipset which is natively supported in kernel 2.6.23.

Warning:This guide requires kernel compilation that may result or make your installed Linux stop working i.e kernel panic. The author will not be held liable to any loss of data, corruption of Linux system and other damages resulted from following this guide, including loss of hair. **grin**. you have been warned

Download the Linux 2.6.23 kernel, move it to /usr/src and decompress it.

Type make menuconfig, under the wireless network drivers section enable the RTL8187 driver support as module and compile.

make dep; make clean; make bzImage; make modules; make modules_install; make install

Your grub.conf should be modified now with the new kernel entry appended on it. Reboot and boot the new kernel. Now let us install the RTL8187 driver module.

depmod -a;/sbin/modprobe rtl8187 OR /sbin/insmod rtl8187.ko

Verify that you have the rtl8187 module loaded.

/sbin/lsmod

Look for the rtl8187, if its there then you should have wmaster0 and wlan0 devices which you can check using

/sbin/ifconfig -a

Now, let us configure wlan0.

/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 down

/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 ESSID your_essid mode Managed key your_key

/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 up

/sbin/dhclient wlan0

Check your logfile for debugging details.

tail -f /var/log/messages

If all went fine then you should get a lease from your dhcp server. If not then feel free to leave me a comment together with the error or debug info.

Keywords: Wireless LAN USB adapter, Linux Wi-Fi adapter