D-Link DWL-510 on Linux 2.6
Introduction
This is an account of my experiences getting my D-Link DWL-510 wireless
networking adapter to work on Linux 2.6. The adapter is a rebranded
RealTek 8180L. Binary drivers are available for Linux 2.4.18 and
2.4.20, but I'm running cutting-edge 2.6, and I want to run it on there.
My Attempts
I tried various combinations of ndiswrapper/driverloader and D-Link binary drivers
for Windows/RealTek
binary drivers for Windows . Driverloader didn't work with either
of the drivers,
simply didn't recognize the device. The D-Link drivers worked with
ndiswrapper, but they caused the system to have serious lags -- once
every couple of seconds, the system would stop responding for a full
second. This was unacceptable. However, with the RealTek
drivers ndiswrapper didn't find a device at all...
That Which Works
I finally got it to work with the RealTek Windows drivers running on
ndiswrapper. It turns out that the RealTek drivers assume PCI-id
10ec:8180, while
the DWL-510 has PCI-id 1186:3300 (you can check this with lspci -n). To make the driver
work, edit the NET8180.INF file supplied with the RealTek driver and
replace all instances of 10ec with 1186 and all instances of 8180 with
3300 (only when it occurs next
to 10ec -- 8180 is used to refer to the name of the chipset as well).
Then install the driver as you normally would with ndiswrapper (i.e.,
you should read the ndiswrapper docs to check how to do that).
Update: Open source driver
It was brought to my attention that an open source driver for the
RealTek 8180L chipset now exists. Apparently it works on Linux 2.6 and
it has been tested with the DWL-510. I have not tried this out myself,
so no guarantees! The driver can be found here.
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Bart Samwel
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