[driverloader] automatic driver loading of RTL8180 on RH9, kernel 2.4.20-37

[Horst Severini]

Hi all,

I just bought driverloader for my RTL8180, since the linux driver
for that card from Realtek isn't very good, and I'm generally pretty 
happy with it.

The one thing I don't understand is that on bootup the driver 
apparently doesn't get loaded properly, even though driverloader 
starts up just fine. Both the local web page, http://127.0.0.1:18020/ ,
as well as '/usr/sbin/dldrconfig -i', tell me there aren't any 
drivers loaded. So I have to either click 'Reload' on the web page -- 
'Refresh' doesn't do it -- or I have to run '/usr/sbin/dldrconfig -d', 
which also reloads it apparently, and then everything's fine.

So for now I do a '/usr/sbin/dldrconfig -d' at the end of my /etc/rc.local,
which does the trick, but I don't think I should have to do that.
Isn't there a simpler way to get it to load? What exactly does the 
web page 'Reload' do? It's much faster than 'dldrconfig -d',
so if I could do that on the command line instead, that would be an
improvement. From watching 'dldrconfig -d', it seems like what
actually loads it is the probing, but how do I do that probing 
just by itself? I can't find a flag that will do just that.

I tried changing the startup order of driverloader, pcmcia, and network,
but that doesn't seem to help. 

The other thing I noticed is that on shutdown, '/etc/init.d/driverloader stop'
doesn't seem to terminate the web page daemon. So I added the line

 kill `cat /var/run/dldrwebconfd.pid`

to /etc/init.d/driverloader in the 'stop' section. Maybe it would be 
useful to make that official? Or is there a reason to keep it running?

Also, ever since I installed driverloader, sometimes my /home 
partition won't unmount on shutdown, claims to be busy, but I can't figure 
out why. Doesn't always happen, but frequently. Any idea why that could be?
Maybe it's something unrelated, but it started happening right after I
installed driverloader, so that makes me wonder ...

And finally, does anyone know of a good linux wireless configuration GUI, 
which scans for available access points, monitors their signal strengths
and quality, and allows me to switch between them? I'm trying to get 
KIFI to compile, but I'm having difficulties because it apparently
needs KDE 3.3, but my RH9 has only 3.1. Any other good tools out there?

Thanks a lot,

	Horst

P.S.: Please be sure to reply to me directly, since I'm not on the 
mailing list at this time.