The 701SD variant sports a replaceable SSD (miniPCIe, comes with 8GB) and one DDR2 slot (default 512 MB, upgradeable without further ado to 2 GB). From a software point of view, it looks like a normal 701 apart from the wlan; RTL8187SE which is not supported in the Lenny kernel.

Our long term goal is to use a driver supported in the kernel upstream. But since that is not available, yet, we rely for now on the following driver from Realtek.

?TableOfContents

Driver from Realtek: rtl8187se

The most useful information about this driver is the following Ubuntu bug# which, though for the MSI Wind, is the same device that is in the 701SD: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/246141

This driver is licensed under the GPL and does not appear to embed non-free firmware.

Building rtl8187se

The latest version (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/18533836/rtl8187se_linux_26.1023.0928.2008.tar.gz) cited in that thread worked for one of our testers building against the latest 2.6.26 kernel in Sid.

The tester was able to get it to associate with an unencrypted AP, get an IP address and ping other nodes. Also, it was possible to get a WPA-TKIP-secured session up. Actually, the difficult part was managing WPA itself. If you look in the tarball, you find a version of WPA included - don't use that one. It's much easier to use wpasupplicant from the Debian repository (in this case, sid variant 0.6.4-2 was used. It's likely that the Lenny-version will work just as well).

Building the drivers is simple, provided you have the required tools (gcc, make etc.) installed. Just execute the 'makedrv' script in driver source directory root. The script will create a number of .ko files in the subdirectories rtl8185 and ieee80211.

Installing rtl8187se temporarily - will not autoload on reboot

The driver files can immediately be inserted in the running kernel by executing the 'wlan0up' script, allowing you to manipulate the wlan0 interface as you see fit. Good for testing.

Installing rtl8187se in a more permanent manner - autoloading

This will make wlan0 autoload during boot. Then, apply your favourite set of wireless connection management tools to the wlan0-interface. Here, you will be on your own - we all have different setups.

Using a prebuilt driver - valid only for kernel 2.6.26-1-686

A prepackaged version of the Realtek driver has been prepared for Debian users, and can be found here: [http://www.martinfiltenborg.dk/debian/debian.html#hw http://www.martinfiltenborg.dk/debian/debian.html#hw]. Download the .deb-file and install it. That's it!

Other sources

See also http://msi-wind-linux.googlecode.com/. Someone did a package for Intrepid from this source, but they have not published the source for their debs.

While it is satisfying to be able to get any driver at all to work for this model, ultimately we need this supported in the kernel upstream, so our next move should be to set aside the Realtek driver for now and see what the kernel devs have for us so far in wireless-testing.

FixMe: link to necessary resources to do this work.