Hi!

I'm, er, well, a newbie. And I'm planning on switching to Fedora 7 from a lifetime of using Windows. But reading the information present on the Sourceforge page for the RTL8185 driver, I really don't understand how to install it! Can anyone help me out? ><

I put this here because it seemed like the right place; I use a Gateway model MX6426 laptop with a Realtek RTL8185 wireless card, an AMD Turion 64 processor, an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics card, and... well, I don't actually know the sound card. >>;

Dunas,

I am not new and am still having problems with the RTL8185. I have had good luck with broadcom and atheros chipsets but this RTL8185 is a bear.

I bought one of those $300.00 Gateways from Best Buy just so I could load Fedora on it. I was able to use ndiswrapper to get the wlan to show up but I could not get the modprobe to actually take. It appears that all is working until I turn my wireless card on then my entire box freezes to the point that it has to be powered off completely and the only way to get back in is to disable the wireless nic before it boots.

So I am having the same problems and am still working on it as well. I only found one site where the guy claimed to have been able to get it working.


-Scott

I'm not new but wireless was a new area for me. I have been a die hard MEPIS user. Since 2004 it has been my favorite linux although I have tried and used many many versions. I decided to buy a wireless router and a wireless pci card and learn about wireless. Of course the two pci cards that I bought both have the realtek rtl8185 chip. Trendnet and Airlink are the brandnames but the cards look pretty much the same.

Here's the interesting part. I was given an old hp pavillion 766 celeron and 64 Mb of ram. Found out that it would take 512Mb so I popped in 384 (all I had) and installed xp over top of me. Then I went to install MEPIS. It wouldn't load, same with antix. Tried all the versions of each then I started on some other versions of linux.I finally found that knoppix, sidux, dsl, and kanotix would all load and install but none of them would accept the .inf file when I tried to load the windows driver with ndiswrapper. Every operating system I installed and tried to load the .inf file said that the .inf file was the wrong one. Then I tried pclinucos 093a 2007. Popped the cd in and rebooted. Took a bit longer than pclinux usually does to boot a live cd so I was almost ready to give up when a screen appeared asking me whether I would like to configure eth0 or wlan0. I was surprised at this coming from a live cd but I chose wlan0 and in a minute or so I was using my wireless card. I was totally amazed by the pclinuxos live cd. Pretty good detection. So I installed pclinuxos to the hard drive and in very little time I was my own network using a realtek 8185 chip based wireless pci card. One thing I did see as pclinux installed was that I think it used a different driver than the 8185. It went by quick but i think it used the rtl8180 or maybe net8180 driver. I'm not in the garage right now so i can't check til tomorrow. When I go out there tomorrow I will do a ndiswrapper -l into konsole as root and see which driver pclinux used on my wireless card.
Just wanted to add this post to the thread seeing how pclinuxos had veryy little or no trouble getting my rtl8185 chip pci wireless card going.
Hats off to PclinuxOS.