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I have to reset my internet connection often to get it to work. When it does work, it's definitely slower than when I'm on my Windows installation. My computer uses an RTL8188CE wireless card from Realtek. I'm running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 12.10. Power management is not on. I've read on other sites that some people fixed the issue pertaining to this wireless card by downloading and installing the drivers from the Realtek site, but it seems as if that only helped people with 32-bit installations. Anyone have any luck with this specific wireless card?

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    Welcome to rtl8188ce-madness. See this answer for the best solution with 12.04: askubuntu.com/a/178098/24489 And no, it is not completely stable (12.04, 64bit).Haven't tried it with 12.10 yet.
    – Thomas
    Oct 24, 2012 at 5:43
  • Thanks! How well has it worked for you to mitigate the issues? And is there a PPA or anything I could hook into apt-get, or would I just have to recompile at every stable release? Are you using 3.5 or 3.6? Oct 24, 2012 at 5:59
  • I was using one of the linux-backports-modules-cw packages - so no recompile necessary. I upgraded the machine to 12.10 and did not look into this for now.
    – Thomas
    Oct 24, 2012 at 6:49

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Putting this into /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8192.conf

options rtl8192ce ips=0 fwlps=0 debug=2

then restart, fixed it for me.

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  • I had a problem with lubuntu 12.10 using the RealTek RTL818CE, where network manager would say it was connected, but I couldn't actually use the wireless until I disconnected and reconnected (same after resuming from sleep/hibernation). Installing linux-backports-modules-cw-etc didn't help, but the solution offered in this answer did (so far at least). I did leave off the debug=2 option.
    – Menachem
    Feb 10, 2013 at 16:43
  • I may have spoken too soon. This did not solve all my issues
    – Menachem
    Feb 14, 2013 at 0:43
  • I have this problem in Ubuntu 13 and there is no /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8192.conf file.
    – eaykin
    Sep 21, 2013 at 23:20
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I had very poor speed with the RTL8188CE until i disabled hardware crypto:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 down && sudo rmmod -f rtl8192ce && sudo modprobe rtl8192ce swenc=1 && sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

Note: 'swenc=1' means software encoding (default is to use hardware-based).

This sped things up significantly (wget I had running at the time went from 5.83KB/s to 812KB/s upon reconnect after reloading module with swenc=1).

If it works for you, add swenc=1 to the relevant module conf file as an option (for persistence after reboot/module-reload).

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  • Note: If your wifi doesn't come back up, you may need to restart wpa_supplicant May 16, 2014 at 1:53
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The drivers you mention from the RealTek site are no longer maintained by them, and they haven't compiled properly on Linux since kernel 3.2.

In light of this and my cursing to have the RTL8188CE like yourself, I forked the driver and I've been maintaining it on Git Hub. It still isn't perfect but most people (myself included) have seen improved performance. I also doctored the driver so that you can crank up your Tx power to 33 dBm if you want, instead of the 20 dBm that the stock driver allows (I can't promise that over-powering won't break you card, but I run mine at 30 quite often with no problems)

You can find the full installation instructions and source code at: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver

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