19th Oct 2009
11:55 pm
Fedora, Linux, Tips
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EeePC 701SD and Fedora 12 Beta.

Just got a ASUS EeePC 701SD which I picked up from Mark Clanton, after he told me at UTOSC 2009 that he was selling it. Sure, it’s not the newest, latest, greatest netbook out there, but it was a plum price and I don’t have any sort of netbook currently.

Tonight I installed Rawhide onto it and everything seemed to work well, except the wireless, which is a RTL8187SE based card. Here’s how I went about enabling it.

  • Checked out the kernel package source from CVS: 
    CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedoraproject.org:/cvs/pkgs
cvs -d $CVSROOT co kernel
cd kernel/F-12
  • Reset the branch to the current kernel in Rawhide: 
    cvs up -r kernel-2_6_31_1-56_fc12
  • Since I’m on a 64-bit box at this point but building for my 32-bit EeePC, I set the architecture flags: 
    setarch i686
  • Edited the config-generic file to set the necessary module line: 
    CONFIG_RTL8187SE=m
  • Retrieved tarballs and built the tree: 
    make srpm
sudo yum-builddep kernel-*.src.rpm
make prep
  • Built the module I needed: 
    cd kernel-2.6.31/linux-2.6.31.i686
make modules_prepare
make M=drivers/staging/rtl8187se modules
  • Copied the resulting module, drivers/staging/rtl8187se/rtl8187se.ko, to the EeePC (via wired Ethernet interface and the scp command) under /lib/modules/2.6.31.1-56.fc12.i686.PAE/extra, and on the EeePC ran depmod -a.
  • At that point, I could run modprobe rtl8187se to enable the wireless, but I also checked it by rebooting and everything worked fine. NetworkManager picked up the card, saw all the local wifi hotspots, and I was off to the races.

I think there may be some work yet to do in the RTL8187SE driver and that’s why it’s not part of the stock kernel yet. My hope is that it will be enabled in a later build so that RTL8187SE-based EeePC wireless will just work out of the box on Fedora. In the meantime, I’m committing this helpful cookbook doc to the googlemind. :-)

7 Comments

  1. Thorsten Leemhuis said,

    October 20, 2009 @ 12:48 am

    Just FYI, I have a RPM Fusion package prepared for review that contains this driver

    /me kicks himself to finally open the review request

  2. Philip Trickett said,

    October 20, 2009 @ 2:07 am

    I was just about to say that this would make using Fedora alot easier for MSI Wind / Advent / Medion Netbook owners, when I saw Thorsten’s post.

    Still, having the driver enabled by default in the kernel would make the installation of Fedora on the above netbooks stupidly easy.

    I must say the F12 development release is the best I have ever tried, using it every day with only a couple of rare minor problems.

    Phil

  3. Peter Robinson said,

    October 20, 2009 @ 5:05 am

    So when are you going to test Moblin on it and give me a report then :-P

  4. Paul said,

    October 20, 2009 @ 10:13 am

    @Peter: You’ll be happy to know I installed the Moblin group and did give it a whirl! I did find a few issues that could use love from someone who knows what he’s doing (i.e. not me). I’ll catch you on IRC or email to discuss. What I was really impressed with was the responsiveness on this low-performance machine!

  5. Christoph said,

    October 20, 2009 @ 1:26 pm

    Maybe this is a totally dump question, but why not use our stock kernel and build only the module you need? http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/CustomKernel#Building_Only_Kernel_Modules_.28Out_Of_Tree_Modules.29 saved me a lot of time and headache.

  6. Thorsten Leemhuis said,

    October 20, 2009 @ 3:56 pm

    Review request for a package which contains this driver

    https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=878
    https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=879

    In fact I created it because someone else I know from real life also needed rtl8187se for Fedora…

  7. Paul said,

    October 21, 2009 @ 9:24 pm

    @Christoph: Not a dumb question, but the method I used only builds the one kernel module I need as well, and that module is in-tree and not out. I probably could have gone either way, really, this is just the route I took.

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