ThinkPad 11b/g/n Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Express Adapter II

From ThinkWiki
Revision as of 01:17, 29 December 2011 by Defriesse (Talk | contribs) (Undo revision 53263 by Defriesse (talk))
Jump to: navigation, search

ThinkPad 11b/g/n Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Express Adapter II

This is a Mini-PCI Express WiFi Adapter, supported by a driver downloadable from Realtek.

Features

  • Chipset: Realtek RTL8192SE / RTL8188CE
  • IEEE Standards: 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n
  • 1x2 MIMO
  • PCI ID:
    • RTL8192SE: 10ec:8172
    • RTL8188CE: 10ec:8176

ThinkPad 11b/g/n Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Express Adapter II

Lenovo Partnumbers

  • 04W1409

Linux support

This chip is supported by the rtlwifi/rtl8192se driver, which was included in kernel in 3.0. There are two other options available, a Linux driver available for download from Realtek, or ndiswrapper. (Ubuntu 10.4 support it now).

ATTENTION!
If you are not comfortable with running development code and have the option, order your ThinkPad with a different WiFi adapter. All other available WiFi options are supported by in-kernel drivers in modern Linux distributions

rtlwifi

The rtlwifi driver which supports this chip was included in kernel 3.0. In some cases the RealTek driver below can be more reliable than the kernel driver.

Realtek Linux driver

The Realtek Linux driver for this chip can be downloaded from the Realtek website

More information about using the Realtek native driver in Ubuntu: [1]

Please note: use of this driver on Lenovo systems results in unpredictable fatal crashes on some systems! It's is *not* advised to choose this driver.

One method that appears to drastically reduce the crashes and connection drops is to comment out "-DENABLE_LPS" from the Makefiles while building the Realtek Linux driver. This also reduces the "noise" in the syslog kernel messages generated by LPS. However, it may reduce the battery life since LPS is an acronym for Low Power State.

Known problems:

* Connections randomly drop out after a few minutes (seems to be fixed in version 015)
  This problem has been observed with version 015 too. Realtek has been contacted about the problem.
* When using WPA Enterprise, entire system will freeze after a few minutes, requiring reboot
* Freezes also happen with Ad-Hoc mode from time to time

The RealTek driver maybe packaged for your distrobution, for example in the AUR for Arch.

ndiswrapper

NOTE!
The use of ndiswrapper is not recommended

More information on using the Windows drivers with Ndiswrapper can be found here:[2].

ThinkPads this card may be found in