Tuesday, 29 April 2014

Ubuntu 14.04 + Windows 8.1 + Realtek RTL8188EE + Google Earth

Wi-Fi Woes (caused by Realtek RTL8188EE)


What a ride it has been. I've encountered some weird and wonderful times with my laptop which has taken me right back to my IT Technician days. Firstly, I partitioned my drive, installed Linux Mint and despite me choosing 'Install Mint 16 over 14'....it formatted the drive. Now the main issue here, was that it overwrote the recovery sector - in other words, it was FUBAR.

Since most of my work is encrypted and backed up on cloud services, I hadn't lost anything of importance, so I did a full re-installation of Windows 8.1. Now, I am unfortunate enough to own a HP laptop with the 'Realtek RTL8188EE' chipset. Let me tell you - this chipset is a NIGHTMARE. At the time of writing, it's not always recognised by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (which is the new Ubuntu LTS) or when it is recognised, it's EXTREMELY slow and intermittent. Soon enough - I couldn't get a connection at all. Both Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 couldn't connect.

After much searching on the web, and encountering people with similar issues, I managed to find a fix. It was the strangest fix in a while, but seemed to work: resetting the BIOS to default settings. This got me a connection on both Ubuntu & Windows. However, wi-fi was still unstable on both OS's. I installed a kernel (3.14) in Linux, which seemed to solve the issue.

If you're on Ubuntu 14.04 and your wi-fi is slow, intermittent and generally crap, you should follow some instructions I posted over on the Ubuntu forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2218962

The user 'basgoossen' on the Ubuntu forums also found that his wi-fi was still unstable, although it was faster when it worked.

The REAL fix seems to be changing the channel in the router; I've since changed the channel of my wi-fi via router settings and so far so good...I'm getting a good speed:



This sounds like a trivial issue, although it taken a hell of a long time to figure out how to fix this. There have been quite a few of us on the Microsoft / Ubuntu forums trying to figure out just what is wrong with our chipset (Realtek RTL8188EE) and it turns out that it might actually be the router that's at fault!

TL;DR - You can try the following fixes:

  • Delete old driver in Windows (Device manager) and re-install the Realtek driver from your manufacturers website
  • Reset BIOS to default settings, then boot into either Ubuntu 14.04 or Windows 8.1
  • Change the channel your router is broadcasting on from 'auto' to something like '2 + 6' if you're on Virgin Media, or another setting if you haven't got this. (Please ensure you have an ethernet cable before you attempt any of these fixes, because you might just need it if things go pear shaped).


Google Earth


And finally, that brings me onto Google Earth. Installing Google Earth on Ubuntu 14.04 isn't as straight forward as downloading the debian file and double clicking - no. That's because ia32-libs is required, and guess what? It is deprecated (since Ubuntu 13.10). I wondered whether it would be possible to install Google Earth anyway - and it turns out that you can - but it requires a bit of hacking to get it to work.

You can go to here or here for instructions on how to install Google Earth on a 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 installation. Good luck, and have fun googling!

Next week i'll update the site with something a bit more security/forensics related.

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