Arch Linux

icetonic

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-10-21

Posts: 104

Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

I recently bought a Thinkpad and now am in the process of configuring Arch on it.. But the wireless card doesn't work as it should...

lspci says that the card is:
06:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (rev 01)

The driver used is rtl8192ce, which should be fine as far as I know... and I'm on Kernel 3.4.4-2..

Now the thing is, it works, but very unstable... wpa_supplicant connects without problems, it works the same way with dhcpd or static, which is :

At one moment, it works perfectly fine, downloads packages I want to install, etc,
one minute later it can not find any host (Unknown error).

When I ping something - sometimes it works instantly with normal time (about 50ms), sometimes not at all, sometimes with time of over 1000ms(!!!) and about 40% packet loss.

What is interesting is that it seems like pinging the router itself works without problems all the time (but with initial lag). But the router can't be the problem, the card itself is fine too... So I suppose the driver is broken somehow? (The wifi on the same laptop works fine with Windows and the same network)

I don't know what to do...

Thanks in advance!

Update:
I started using networkmanager and strangely the problems vanished I hope it'll stay that way...

Last edited by icetonic (2012-08-05 19:56:22)

tzar

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-08-26

Posts: 21

Website

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

I have the same problem on a system76 gazp6, what do you mean by "configured networkmanager"?

Cheers

Last edited by tzar (2012-07-15 05:17:54)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

Icetonic,  I also just got a Thinkpad, albiet the low end one, but I love it.  I also did not opt for the Intel card as I should have.  What I have found works well for me is loading the rtl8192ce module with fwlps off and ips off.  You can see what options are available for a given module by running

$ modinfo <module>

So make a file in /etc/modprobe.d and call it rtl8192ce.conf (you can actually name it whatever as long as it ends in .conf, I just use a single modprobe.conf for everything), in it put the following:

options rtl8192ce fwlps=0 ips=0

It seems (at least in my experience with the card) that the real part of the fix is the fwlps (firmware low power state) being off.  But the other seems to help a bit too.  Obviously you will no longer get the power saving features of the card, but I think having a stable internet connection is worth a bit more pwoer use.  I hope this helps!

tzar

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-08-26

Posts: 21

Website

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

I have done that for quite some time:

tapio@tartufo> cat /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8192ce.conf
options rtl8192ce ips=0 fwlps=0 swenc=1

I still have issues.. Very sad that this card is a POS under Linux as it's what came in my system76 laptop that's supposed to be great for Linux compatibility. Just hoping it improves in the future now.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

So I know it has been a few days since the last post, but I was just checking to see if your situation had improved.  I am sad to see that it has not.  I also noticed that the system76 laptops came with realtek stuff in them and was a bit shocked and dismayed.  It is certainly *not* linux friendly.  I really wish I had just bought the Intel card with my machine, but I did not know I would be getting such a peice of crap wifi card.  Ultimately I reflashed w/o the whitelist and installed an Intel Centrino 6235, and it is fantastic.  I didn't realize just how terrible my old card really ran under Linux until I installed Windows for sh*t's, and it ran well (not great).  The Intel Advanced-N totally shames it though.

tzar

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-08-26

Posts: 21

Website

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

Hah, well, since then my realtek (lol) audio has been glitching out - that seems to finally have stopped in the last couple of days, but 2 weeks with my sound skipping constantly wasn't particularly fun..

Wireless is alrightish, it's still pretty laggy and times out, but it's much better than it was I think. I ended up getting an Atheros USB wifi for when I need reliability because of work conferencing etc, that works well.

Overall, not particularly happy about these issues, but this laptop is still the nicest I've owned, and I'm happy that I didn't need to pay the microsoft tax. Things (touchwood) seem to be improving!

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

FWIW, there is a great community at mydigitallife.com and that is ultimately where I ended up finding someone familiar enough with the bios to remove the whitelist for me.  there also seems to be a pretty great community at bios-mods.com though it seems it is mroe intended for people like overclockers and whatnot.

Fayden

Member

Registered: 2012-08-09

Posts: 3

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

I have the same problem. Even with a conf file in the modprobe.d directory, it doesn't work _great_, it's better than nothing. I'm wondering if I should try to replace my network card (if it's even possible on a thinkpad x230, I haven't checked) or if one can hope a fix will arise...

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

It is possible, but you either have to buy a lenovo card with a proper FRU, or you have to flash a modified bios with the whitelist removed.  I did the latter... and I love it.  Lenovo, as great as their computers are, are terrible about the prices of component prices.  Best exemplified by just trying to upgrade from say 4 to 8 gb which is weel over a hundred dollars.

brito

Member

Registered: 2013-03-21

Posts: 4

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

It is possible, but you either have to buy a lenovo card with a proper FRU, or you have to flash a modified bios with the whitelist removed.  I did the latter... and I love it.

Where did you get the bios with the whitelist removed? I would love to do the same on my x230.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

This thread.  I am fiarly certain that I have seen this already taken care of.  It is a massive thread though, so the search function on top would do you wonders. 

Please note though that it seems that the Lenovo Windows 8 bioses are very different and the removal of the whitelist is not so straight forward apparently.  So I was unable to get the newest bios handled for my E430.

brito

Member

Registered: 2013-03-21

Posts: 4

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

This thread.  I am fiarly certain that I have seen this already taken care of.  It is a massive thread though, so the search function on top would do you wonders. 

Please note though that it seems that the Lenovo Windows 8 bioses are very different and the removal of the whitelist is not so straight forward apparently.  So I was unable to get the newest bios handled for my E430.

So the laptop for which you removed the whitelist is actually a E430 and not an X230, right?
I have already seen that thread, in fact I follow it closely, but so far nobody has been able to fix the BIOS for the X230.

How did you brick your laptop? Did you solve your problem?

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: Wireless card (RTL8188CE) on Thinkpad L530? [seems solved]

Yeah, I had the bios whitelist removed for my E430.  I searched the thread, and you seem to be right that flashing the bios seems to be somewhat difficult.  Though I think that the references there then to be for the x230 tablet.  I didn't search all that hard, but the few posts I viewed were all the tablet.

I think what bricked my laptop was the UEFI bug.  I got a kernel panic, and the dump was all funky looking.  Normally you can somewhat decipher what caused the panic and whatnot, nothing of the sort here, I could barely tell it was a kernel panic.  After that I couldn't boot.  I couldn't even get a POST, which is what made me suspicious of the UEFI thing.  Apparently what is happening when those Samsungs were bricked was that the NVRAM was being written to with garbage.  So I thought that maybe that is where the missing info from the kernel panic went.  Again, this is pure speculation, as I have no way of confirming, but I contacted Matthew Garrett and he said that my report was similar to a few other ThinkPad brickings that had also been reported to him.

The way my problem was "solved" was warranty repair.  Essentially my warranty was voided when I flashed the modified bios, but if the bios is unreachable, they have no way of telling that (and I also think that my issue was totally unrelated to having a modified bios anyway), so they replaced my motherboard.

So now I have a Windows 8 bios, which is fast to POST, as this is one of the specifications for the windows 8 certification.  But Serg008 from that thread I linked to told me that although he can modify the bios itself, it is again a case of being unable to flash the then modified bios to the machine.  So I was stuck with the RTL8188CE until I figured out the relevant FRU for the Intel card that was an option with my machine.  I found one of them on ebay just the other day and it works amazingly.  Though now I have a top of the line 2x2 Intel card that I can't use (6235) and apparently has to have a very recent chipset to use.  So I cannot even put it in an older machine either... I'll find a use for it eventually though.

So good luck with your issue.  I'd say take a look at the FRU parts list for your machine.  The list for teh E430 didn't include the Intel card for some reason, so a bit of hunting was necessary.  But it might be included in your machine's list.  When you find it, you can at least go to this page to see how much IBM or Lenovo will charge you for it.