Member Avatar for supersonic

I have linux installed on my laptop. (Redhat 9). All works ok except sound and wireless lan. I'm not worried about the sound at all so that does not matter. But it is not recognizing the wireless card. Does anyone know of any linux drivers for the trendnet tew 226pc/tew-228pi wlan for the laptop? I have searched but no luck:( Thanks in advance.

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Short summary and next steps tied to the thread: correctly steered you toward identifying the NIC; that revealed a Realtek-based device and explains why Red Hat 9 did not bring it up automatically. pointed to the community driver effort — that’s the usual approach on a 2.4-era laptop. Below are concise, practical steps and realistic options so the card can be put on air.

Red Hat 9 shipped with a 2.4.20-series kernel, so modern in-kernel RTL818x support (added much later to the 2.6 tree) isn’t available out of the box; expect to use an out-of-tree driver or upgrade the kernel/distro if you want native support. See an RH9 overview for the shipped kernel and the kernel-driver listing for when rtl8180 support appeared in-tree. Linux Journal: Red Hat 9 review. (linuxjournal.com)

Quick troubleshooting checklist (do these before compiling anything):

uname -r
lsmod | grep -i rtl
dmesg | tail
ifconfig -a
iwconfig

If lspci is missing, install the pciutils package. To compile drivers you will need matching kernel headers/devel plus gcc and make. Always build the module against the exact running kernel.

Driver choices and short workflow:

  • Proprietary Realtek driver: historically Realtek provided prebuilt drivers for RH and SuSE (can be stable but binary and sometimes version-specific).
  • Community driver (rtl8180 / rtl8180-sa2400): this project was created to support RTL8180/related radios on older kernels; it’s the usual choice when you can’t or don’t want to upgrade the kernel. The wireless-tools driver status page has background and notes on these projects. (hewlettpackard.github.io)

If you pick the community driver, the usual steps are: download the tarball, extract, run make against your kernel headers, then su -c 'make install' and modprobe rtl8180. If that fails, either upgrade to a newer kernel (where rtl8180 was merged) or try the vendor binary that matches your exact RH9 kernel build. Back up configs and remember modules must be built for the exact running kernel.

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Member Avatar for DMR

If you run the following command, what info does it return concerning the exact chipset that your NIC uses:

lspci -vv | grep Eth

(Case-sensitive; the first "l" is a lower-case "L")

Member Avatar for supersonic

I just tried it. It is saying lspci command not found.

Member Avatar for DMR

Weird- I know that the lspci command does normally work on RH 9.0. :?:

Try this command instead and see what you get:

less /proc/pci |grep Eth

Member Avatar for supersonic

Weird- I know that the lspci command does normally work on RH 9.0. :?:

Try this command instead and see what you get:

less /proc/pci |grep Eth

I tried that first command you gave me logged on as root and it did work. This is the output it gave me.

5:00.0 Ethernet controller realtek semiconductor co. ltd unknown device 8180 (rev 20)


thanks

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