Covers the peculiarities applying to the 701SD, which looks like a normal 701, but uses 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.

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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 cited in that thread did not work for one of our testers building against the latest 2.6.26 kernel in Lenny.

The earlier version from July (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/16098501/rtl8187se_linux_26.1016.0716.2008.tar.gz) built OK, and the tester was able to get it to associate with an unencrypted AP, get an IP address and ping other nodes.

To build a module that will load without unknown symbol errors, follow this tip:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/246141/comments/47

Tarball of driver, prebuilt for lenny/sid 2.6.26

Until this driver is packaged, we have built it against 2.6.26-8, packed up the whole build tree, and made it available here:

http://people.debian.org/~synrg/debian-eeepc/packages/rtl8187se_linux_26.1016.0716.2008-bin.tar.gz

Unpack this and read the included 'readme'. You can skip building the driver itself since that is already done and just use 'wlan0up' to bring the interface up.