Owners of laptops with Realtek wired and wireless cards will already be aware of problems with support in recent kernels. The new kernel in Fedora 13 seems to add further strangeness. I'm documenting it here to help anyone else with similar configurations. Will amend as I find further information on what works.
My setup:
Realtek 8102E 10/100 wired ethernet
Realtek 8187SE wireless card
intel atom based board
(SL NB1000 - a pretty unusual machine, but quite similar to msi wind and others)
I'm not sure how far this applies to other wireless cards, but I think anyone having the 8102E/8187SE combination will probably have the same issues.
There has always been a problem with drivers for the 8187SE. The r8187 (now renamed rtl8187) driver built into the kernel will get selected for it - but won't work. All it will do is kill the wired network, no idea why. When you run lspci, if you have a wireless driver installed, the 8102E interface won't be listed. But up to F13, you could always get the wired network to work by temporarily blacklisting the wireless driver (note that now, you need to blacklist both r8187 and rtl8187) and rebooting.
But just blacklisting the wireless driver seems to have stopped working in F13. I've no idea why. But once I got the wired card disabled by a conflict with the wireless driver, nothing I did in F13 seemed to be able to fix it (even booting from an F13 livecd, the 8102E card was not listed under lspci).
The fix? Boot from an older livecd (I used an F11 livecd I had lying around, but I'm guessing most will work). lspci will show the 8102E card - but more important, it's still there when you reboot from F13 (so long as you don't have that wireless driver loaded). Painful, but at least a partial solution.
As for getting the wireless card running under F13, I had to uninstall and reinstall ndiswrapper (you get this from rpmfusion repo); preupgrade didn't seem to handle it properly. Once done, I reloaded the xp drivers I had (I didn't try any others, not sure if the vista drivers would work), and lo and behold a working wireless lan card (but of course, a dead wired connection). See
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ultimate_Guide for ndiswrapper info.
Two other comments: there is a version of the manufacturer's own driver that is supposed to be able to work. I've had it running ages ago under ubuntu, but was never able to get it to work under fedora. YMMV. And there might be some hope on the way:
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/rtl8187
(see comment on unsupported chips)
Linear Mode
