Realtek RTL8185L based WLAN NIC in Ubuntu Linux

Deltaco Wireless PCI LAN Adapter is an affordable WLAN NIC (12,50 € in Finland). It is based on Realtek RTL8185L chip and is recognized by Ubuntu Lucid with the kernel module "rtl8180". However, the link quality is poor, around 15/100.

This driver specific problem can solved by using the kernel module "r8185b" provided by Realtek. In my case the link quality increased 500%... being now around 75/100.

1. Download the driver package.
2. Unpack .tar.gz: tar xzvf rtl8185*.tar.gz
3. Change current directory to rtl8185: cd rtl8185*/rtl8185
4. Use your favourite text editor to comment out or remove the line 2065 in a file r8180_core.c:

   // rdtsc_rtl(prism_hdr[5], prism_hdr[4]);

   for avoiding the compile time error "implicit declaration of function ‘rdtsc_rtl’".
5. Compile the module: make
6. Install the module: sudo make install
7. Add the module "rtl8180" to blacklist: echo "blacklist rtl8180" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rtl8180.conf
8. Reboot the machine.