After more than three hour googling and trying, I’ve found the right way to get wireless to my brand new Toshiba L40. There was some weird workaround, with a modified driver, but it wasn’t very clean, and I need WPA support. After all, it all got to this:

  • Download the driver from Realtek site;
  • Install Ndiswrapper: sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper
  • Extract the archive, enter the Win98 folder and install the driver with: sudo ndiswrapper -i net8187b.inf
  • Get the modules dependencies confirmed: sudo depmod -a
  • Load Ndiswrapper module: sudo modprob ndiswrapper
  • Add Ndiswrapper to auto-load modules list: echo ‘ndiswrapper’ | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
  • Get the alias from wlan0 to link to Ndiswrapper: sudo ndiswrapper -m
  • Reboot
  • Enjoy

If this is not enough, it wasn’t for me, force the driver to load your device, here’s how I did it:

tiagoboldt@Kyu:~/RTL8187B$ lsusb

The following was somewhere in the output: Bus 006 Device 002: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. That 0bda:8197 is the device ID, so, I’ve forced the application to control it by doing: sudo ndiswrapper -a 0bda:8197 net8187b

I’m now happy and using it without any issues, behind a personal wpa2 secured wireless network!

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