rtl8180 chipset

If you happen to have a wireless card based on the RealTek rtl8180 chipset and want to use it in Linux without using ndiswrapper (there are probably about 4 people on Earth like this), you may find this interesting/useful.

I have a Linksys WPC11v4 PCMCIA wireless card. There's an open-source driver for it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtl8180-sa2400, and the driver lets you run it in monitor mode. Monitor mode is what lets you run wireless network detectors like kismet. (ndiswrapper, which lets you run wireless cards in Linux using Windows drivers, doesn't support monitor mode, even for cards which which do). The released versions doesn't work for me (in CentOS 5), but the CVS version does. You can get the CVS code by running the following:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@rtl8180-sa2400.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rtl8180-sa2400 login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@rtl8180-sa2400.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/rtl8180-sa2400 co -P rtl8180-sa2400-dev

Then you'll need to edit a couple of files. In
rtl8180-sa2400-dev/r8180_core.c, comment out the lines beginning with MODULE_PARM and MODULE_PARM_DESC (there are four of each, found on lines 137-147 of the file). And in rtl8180-sa2400-dev/Makefile, remove the text MODVERDIR=$(PWD) from line 62. (I have a patch file with both of those edits--leave a comment if you'd like me to send a copy).

Then just run 'make', and then you can run the following commands to insert the kernel modules (the order is important):

/sbin/insmod ieee80211_crypt-r8180.ko
/sbin/insmod ieee80211_crypt_wep-r8180.ko
/sbin/insmod ieee80211-r8180.ko
/sbin/insmod r8180.ko