Wireless problem with RTL8723 and Fedora 18: can't connect to a wpa2-secured network

Question

I'm running Fedora 18 on a Toshiba laptop with the notorious RTL8723 wireless card. I've been able to compile the driver using lwfinger's instructions from this forum thread here

wget http://linuxwireless.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-2012-10-03.tar.bz2
wget http://www.lwfinger.com/realtek_drivers/rtl8723ae_master_patch
tar jxvf compat-wireless-2012-10-03.tar.bz2
cd compat-wireless-2012-10-03/
patch -p1 < ../rtl8723ae_master_patch
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe -v rtl8723ae

After performing these steps the device can indeed see the available wireless networks. The problem appears when I actually try to connect to one of the WPA2-secured ones -- the Gnome network manager keeps asking me for authentication and refuses to establish the connection. I take it I should now figure out whether this is a driver issue or a network manager issue (or something else) but I'm not sure how to proceed.

EDIT: It appears that the problem isn't with the network manager after all: after disabling Network Manager I tried running wpa_supplicant from the terminal, and all I got in response were the following messages, which just kept coming:

wlan0: Trying to associate with 7c:4f:b5:8e:a0:87 (SSID='mynetwork' freq=2462 MHz)
ioctl[SIOCSIWFREQ]: Device or resource busy
wlan0: Association request to the driver failed
wlan0: Associated with 7c:4f:b5:8e:a0:87
wlan0: Authentication with 7c:4f:b5:8e:a0:87 timed out.
wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00 reason=0
wlan0: Trying to associate with 7c:4f:b5:8e:a0:87 (SSID='mynetwork' freq=2462 MHz)
ioctl[SIOCSIWFREQ]: Device or resource busy
wlan0: Association request to the driver failed
wlan0: Associated with 7c:4f:b5:8e:a0:87

Answer 1

I already solved the problem, to avoid this:

[root@dhcppc2 compat-wireless-2012-12-18]# make
./scripts/gen-compat-autoconf.sh /home/kiwi/compat-wireless-2012-12-18/.config /home/kiwi/compat-wireless-2012-12-18/config.mk > include/linux/compat_autoconf.h
make -C /lib/modules/3.7.5-201.fc18.x86_64/build M=/home/kiwi/compat-wireless-2012-12-18 modules
make: *** /lib/modules/3.7.5-201.fc18.x86_64/build: No such file or directory.  Stop.
make: *** [modules] Error 2

I had to install the kernel-devel pack, I did it through yum:

yum install kernel-devel

But to fix the wirelesss problem I did the following:

1. I downloaded the latest version of compat-wireless here, in my case I downloaded this one: compat-wireless-2012-12-18.tar.bz2.

2. Then after entered with a terminal into the directory where I saved the file I typed this:

su
tar -xjvf compat-wireless-2012-12-18.tar.bz2
cd compat-wireless-2012-12-18
make
make install

1. Once installed, to test the driver I needed, which is rtl8723ae I typed this:

modprobe rtl8723ae

...and the wireless worked well. Then I restart the computer and now the wireless is working properly.