rtl8187 Linux kernel driver
Released under the terms of GNU General Public Licence (GPL)
Copyright(c) Andrea Merello - 2004,2005

Portions of this driver are based on other projects, please see the notes
in the source files for detail.
A special thanks go to Realtek corp for their support and to David Young
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This is an attempt to write somethig that can make rtl8187 usb dongle wifi card
on Linux using only opensource stuff. 
The rtl8225 radio is supported.

It's in early development stage so don't expect too much from it 
(also use it at your own risk!)
This should be considered just a fragment of code.. using it on your(any) 
system is at your own risk! Please note that I never supported the idea to 
use it in any way, so i cannot be considered responsible in any way for 
anything deriving by it usage.

Anyway for now we have monitor mode and managed mode
basically working! This isn't necessary stable, but seems to work.. 

This driver is still under development and very far from perfect. It should work on x86,
Other archs are untested..

To compile the driver simply run make.

The driver contains also the ieee80211.h and ieee80211_crypt.h from the ieee stack.
Note that for some reasons this stack is NOT the same that will be included in newer
2.6 kernel. I will try to port to this stack as soon as it will have enought features
to support 8187 cards. 
Please note that you will have to make sure the two .h files are the same of the ieee
stack.
In other words when you download from the CVS this driver and the ieee80211 stack a good
idea is to copy the ieee80211.h and ieee80211_crypt.h from the ieee directory to the drv
directory

Warning during compile are OK

To wake up the nic run:

   ifconfig <ifacename> up 

(where <ifacename> is your network device for wlan card).

Please note that the default interface name is wlanX.

Please note thet this will take several seconds.. 

If you would like to set the interface name to something else you may use the 
'devname=' module parameter. For example:

   insmod r8187.ko ifname=eth%d 

will set the interface name of this device to something like eth0.

Once the nic is up it can be put in a monitor mode by running:

   iwconfig <ifacename> mode monitor

and channel number may be changed by running:

   iwconfig <ifacename> channel XX


In monitor mode a choice may be made via iwpriv if the nic should pass packets 
with bad crc or drop them.

To put the nic in managed mode run:

   iwconfig <ifacename> mode managed

In managed mode there is support for

   iwlist scan

that should report the currently available networks.
Please note that in managed mode channels cannot be changed manually.

To associate with a network
   
   iwconfig <ifacename> essid XXXXX

where XXXXX is the network essid (name) reported by 'iwlist scan'. Please
note that essid is case sensitive.

If your network is not broadcasting the ESSID, then you need to specify *also*
the AP MAC address 

   iwconfig <ifacename> ap XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

The driver accepts another boolean parameter: hwseqnum
If set to 1 it lets the card HW take care of the sequence number of the TXed 
frames. Altought in managed mode I can't see an important reason to use HW to 
do that, when we'll start to TX beacons in master (AP) and ad-hoc modes most 
probably it will be extremely useful (since most probably we will use two HW 
queues).

I'm unsure if it will work correctly on all NICs.. reports are *VERY, VERY* apreciated.. 

 
 WEP
 ===

WEP encryption should work. For now it's done by host, not by the nic. Key can be set with:
Key can be set with
   
   iwconfig <ifacename> key 12345...

WEP is supported via software thanks to the ipw stack.

Shared and open authentication are supported

 IWPRIV
 ======

This driver supports some private handlers:
-badcrc: let you choose to kill or to pass to the upper layer frames with bad crc in monitor mode
-activescan: if 0 the driver will avoid to send probe requests, sanning will be only on beacon basis


If you have some question/comments please feel free to write me.

