A couple of days ago I wrote that there is a driver for RTL8180 based wlan cards available. With SUSE 10 it’s already build into the kernel. Yay! I learned about this through the SUSE Laptop mailing list. Read on.

How To Get Started

First I uninstalled ndiswrapper so I could start from scratch. You might want to do the same should you have it installed (or Linuxant, or…). I also deleted my wlan0 entry from my network settings via Yast.

In order to have your card correctly recognized you will need to update the package hwinfo. You’ll find it under [1]. After you installed it, plug your card in and start the network device tool in Yast to set up your card. When the screen is ready for you you should be able to see your wlan card associated with the RTL driver r8180.

Now go ahead and set up your network. Decide if you want DHCP or not. Then under detailed settings -> advanced -> hardware details set your card to pcmcia (given it is a pcmcia card, mine is). Under the detailed settings -> advanced -> detailed settings set the device activation to hot plug, and check user controlled.

The next screen (after clicking next) allows you to set the ESSID for your wireless access point, and your authentication. For testing purposes you might want to start without any encryption. Click next and your network will be set up.

The Last Finishing Steps

With some luck you are all set now. In my case that wasn’t the case. The card was recognized and set up, but a network connection could not be established. Maybe I should have restarted my laptop, but I didn’t. Instead I added the following line to the file /etc/modfile.local.conf:

alias wlan0 r8180

My network connection could now be established. I could ping machines in my network, but couldn’t get beyond. It turned out that the wlan interface didn’t get the name servers. In order to fix this I added the following lines to my /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-bus-pcmcia file:

DHCLIENT_SET_DEFAULT_ROUTE=’yes’
DHCLIENT_MODIFY_RESOLV_CONF=’yes’
DHCLIENT_PRIMARY_DEVICE=’yes’

These lines make sure that your wlan interface gets a default gateway and nameservers. Restarting the wlan connection by plugging the card out and in again should get you going now.

Resources

[1] hwinfo package