Fix Realtek RTL8192SU Ubuntu driver

Here’s quick fix for annoyed users with Realtek RTL8192SU WiFi chipsets wanting some WiFi…

I just bought a new Wi-Fi dongle for my netbook (due to woes with the Broadcom card inside, but that’s a whole other post) and although my no-name budget £10 dongle boasted ‘Linux support’ on the packaging I was a mite miffed to find it incapable of mustering even a faint signal of anything when plugged into my Ubuntu 10.10-running device.

Doubly annoying given it works flawlessly in Natty…

So what’s up?

After Googling around I came up on a bug report titled “Please include firmware for RTL8192SU“. The response was illuminating: -

“On 10.04 & 10.10 the firmware is already there but its in the wrong location.”

The solution to is open a terminal and pop in the following command: -

sudo cp -R /lib/firmware/RTL8192SE /lib/firmware/RTL8192SU

Reboot and, fingers crossed, your dongle will be up and receiving – certainly worked for me!

Need to find out what chipset your dongle uses? Plug it in, open a terminal and type ‘lsusb’. All connected USB devices will be listed.

Wi-Fi app ‘inSSIDer 2′ For Ubuntu

The first Linux release of  award-winning open-source Wi-Fi scanner toolinSSIDer 2 has been made available for download.

inSSIDer scans any network(s) available to your WiFi card/dongle and tracks the signal strength over time – even if you’re not connected to it. This makes it an invaluable tool when deciding on a network to join or for detecting performance issues with your own network.

Download

As this release is of alpha quality it is not recommended for users dependant on the use of a stable WiFi scanning tool.

Pre-packaged .deb files are available for both 32bit and 64bit Ubuntu @github.com/metageek-llc/inSSIDer-2-Cross-Platform/downloads

How to change network card speed and duplex settings in ubuntu

If you want to change speed and duplex of your network card you have to use ethtool or mii-tool.


ethtool can be used to query and change settings such as speed, auto- negotiation and checksum offload on many network devices, especially Ethernet devices.

In ubuntu if you want to use mii-tool you have to install net-tools package.

Net-tools package includes the important tools for controlling the network subsystem of the Linux kernel. This includes arp, ifconfig, netstat, rarp, nameif and route. Additionally, this package contains utilities relating to particular network hardware types (plipconfig, slattach, mii-tool) and advanced aspects of IP configuration (iptunnel, ipmaddr).

In the upstream package ‘hostname’ and friends are included. Those are not installed by this package, since there is a special “hostname*.deb”.

Install required packages

sudo apt-get install ethtool net-tools

First you need to find the existing network card speed for this you can use the following command

ethtool eth0

Once you have the current speed and duplex details you can change using the following commands

If you want to setup eth0 10 or 100 or 1000 speed with ethtool try this

sudo ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off speed 10 duplex half

sudo ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off speed 100 duplex full

sudo ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off speed 1000 duplex full

If you want to make it permanent you have to add following lines to /etc/network/interfaces file

gksudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

Add the following line

pre-up /usr/sbin/ethtool -s $IFACE autoneg off 100 duplex full

Save and exit the file

sudo networking restart


enjoy...