Trouble obtaining persistent wireless connection with USB

[RussC]

I 'm familiar Windows PCs but am fairly new to Linux. A coworker of mine has an old PC which was running WinXP. The hard drive completely crashed so I suggested that if I put in an old hard drive and installed Linux Mint it could keep her going until they purchased a new computer. They wanted it to hookup to their wireless network at home. So I picked out a USB wireless adaptor that claimed to be Linux compatible. Now I'm having trouble getting it all to work together for them.

Here's the setup:
Compaq Presario SR1150NX
Processor AMD Athlon XP 3200+
Operating System Linux Mint 10 Julia
Kernel Linux 2.6.35-22-generic (i686)
Desktop Environment GNOME 2.32.0

Patriot Memory Wireless 802.11n USB Adapter PCBOWAU2-N which apparently has a Realtek 8712 chip.
Came with a CD with windows, mac and Linux drivers, however the Linux driver seemed didn't support kernel 2.6.35,
so I downloaded the current driver from the Realtek website - "RTL8191SU_usb_linux_v2.6.6.0.20110401.zip"

Extracted the zip file to folder "rtl8712_8188_8191_8192SU_usb_linux_v2.6.6.0.20110401"
Within the sub-folder "driver" I uncompressed the file "rtl8712_8188_8191_8192SU_usb_linux_v2.6.6.0.20110401.tar.gz"
which created the folder "rtl8712_8188_8191_8192SU_usb_linux_v2.6.6.0.20110401"
I opened this sub-folder in a terminal window and and, per Realtek's instructions ran:

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   $ make

Here I ran into trouble. The command would not complete because of errors.
After a lot of searching and googling I narrowed it down to a typographical error in the file "osdep_service.h"
Within "osdep_service.h" I had to change the line "#include <linux/shed.h>" to "#include <linux/sched.h>".
With this change make ran without a hitch.
Following Realtek's instruction's I ran:

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   $ ./clean

and then

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   $ insmod 8712u.ko

however, this produced errors. I noticed that Realtek's instructions are based upon Fedora 2.6.24. I tried more googling and trying different things, including Ndiswrapper, which got the system to recognize there was a wireless device but would not connect to the wireless network. Eventually I tried:

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   $ sudo modprobe 8712u.ko

which finally got the wireless connection up and running. However, it is very unstable and keeps disconnecting after sitting for a while. And after rebooting I have to rerun modprobe 8712u.ko.

How do I keep the wireless usb connection persistent?
Is the ndiswrapper causing problems, if so how do I correct that?

amy@balzer-SR1150NX ~ $ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8378 [KM400/A] Chipset Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237/VX700 PCI Bridge
00:08.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
00:0a.0 Communication controller: Agere Systems V.92 56K WinModem (rev 03)
00:0b.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev 80)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller (rev 80)
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 80)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome] (rev 01)

amy@balzer-SR1150NX ~ $ lsusb
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 058f:9360 Alcor Micro Corp. 8-in-1 Media Card Reader
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0bda:8172 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8191S WLAN Adapter
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

amy@balzer-SR1150NX ~ $ lsmod (just selected entries)
Module Size Used by
8712u 308155 0
...
ndiswrapper 184207 0
...

Thanks for any help that anyone can offer.
Russ

[Beardedragon]

One must assume that your router is of the "N" variety. Moving on; some routers have the need of a constant ping to keep them connected, there should be some instructions on how to configure this with the router or on the disk that accompanied it.

[RussC]

Thanks for the suggestion. I was wondering about that, however, I couldn't find anything that I understood to address it.
Meanwhile, after more googling and searching the Linux Mint, Ubuntu and various other websites, I think I have solved the problem.
I had to add a line to a file in the /etc/ folder using:

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sudo gedit /etc/module

I added the line

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8712u

It seems to be working ok. Not the best signal, but its working.

Russ