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ugopozo's questions

Martin Hope
ugopozo
Asked: 2012-05-20 18:04:20 +0800 CST
  • 37

I bought a new laptop with a RTL8723AE-BT wireless card, but it seems there is nothing that makes it work.

Realtek usually makes drivers available for its card, but this specific one doesn't have a driver available on Realtek's website. I have tried the following steps in order to try and make it work:

  1. Installed ndiswrapper versions 1.57 (from repositories, with dkms) and 1.58rc1 (compiled from source from ndiswrapper's website). Both failed: version 1.57 does not provide an interface for the functions IoWMIOpenBlock and IoWMIQueryAllData. 1.58rc1 has dummy functions in their places, but it fails with a "ioremap failed" message.

    Upon further investigation, I have found that the function NdisMMapIOSpace (ndis.c:808), in 1.58rc1, gets called with physical address and length zero, which causes the failure. Since this function doesn't seem to be called from anywhere in ndiswrapper's code, I'd assume the Windows driver is somehow calling it with bogus parameters.

  2. I tried using both the 64-bit version (on my installed system, which uses the x86_64 version of Ubuntu) and the 32-bit version (on a live-USB x86 system with persistence enabled) of the Windows XP driver. The same errors occurred for both versions.

  3. Since Realtek's Linux drivers for RTL8192CE/SE/DE actually mention the 8723 chipset in its sources, I tried compiling them and modprobing them, but they don't pick up the card ID (10ec:8723). I also tried to echo 10ec 8723 > new_id on the sysfs (/sys/bus/pci/drivers/rtl8192de) location ( of the driver (actually, on each of them, one at a time), but I get a "Permission denied" error even with sudo. If I sudo su and try again, I get the error bash: echo: write error: Invalid argument.

I have run out of ideas. It's really frustrating to buy a new notebook to use only with Ubuntu and not be able to use its wi-fi connection.

If anyone can shed a light on alternatives, I'd be very thankful.

Edit: lshw -C network output

$ sudo lshw -C network -numeric
  *-network UNCLAIMED     
       description: Network controller
       product: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. [10EC:8723]
       vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. [10EC]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
       version: 00
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: ioport:d000(size=256) memory:f7900000-f7903fff
  *-network
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10EC:8168]
       vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. [10EC]
       physical id: 0.2
       bus info: pci@0000:04:00.2
       logical name: eth0
       version: 0a
       serial: 00:90:f5:cd:6d:f7
       size: 100Mbit/s
       capacity: 1Gbit/s
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=full firmware=N/A ip=192.168.0.106 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s
       resources: irq:43 ioport:c000(size=256) memory:f2104000-f2104fff memory:f2100000-f2103fff
wireless drivers realtek