Ubuntu 10.10 r8192se_pci driver on the Toshiba Satellite T130-17E (Realtek RTL8191SEvB)
Filed under: Development, Linux, Phone, Ubuntu, Windows
I’ve been home for a few days with a really bad back, and the only thing I’ve been able to do is watch tv, and some minor work with the laptop. I’ve been running Windows 7 which it was delivered with for a few months to get a feel of it, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised for the most part. It hasn’t crashed more than once or twice in three months, and it is fairly snappy (except boottimes seems to get worse and worse, at this point it takes 2-3 minutes to boot). Anyways, for some reason I get a bit sad inside (and bored) every time I boot Windows, there is just “something” about the feel, the look or… I can’t really put my finger on it, that I can’t stand. How the windows open and close perhaps, I just don’t know.
So, yesterday I wanted to test android SDK, re-realized just how much of a bitch it is to install stuff on Windows, so I finally got around to installing Ubuntu 10.10 on it (Already running 10.10 on desktop and mediapc), removing the extra backup partition they deliver laptops with these days. Sidenote, isn’t it a bit like selling a candle with a flammable fire extinguisher to sell a laptop with 500gig harddrive, split it in half, and use on half for “backups”? I digress.
So, installation went almost flawless. The wireless card was identified, saw networks, but was unable to connect to any of them. I managed to pass the installation using trusty old cables, and after installation was done I started fiddling about, reading on the net etc, and found noone who had solved the combination or at least written about it.
Main problem seems to have been hardware wep encoding/decoding, which can be turned off using the hwwep flag to the r8192se_pci module. On Ubuntu 10.10, remove the module, and then reload it by doing this:
rmmod r8192se_pci
modprobe r8192se_pci hwwep=0
If your network works now, you can automate the setting by editing/adding the configuration to modprobe.d, by editing /etc/modprobe.d/realtek.conf and adding the following line:
options r8192se_pci hwwep=0
I hope this has been some help!