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Linksys WMP600N wireless N ethernet card in Linux...it does work

Posted 05-09-2012 at 03:48 AM by vik
Updated 12-18-2012 at 11:01 PM by vik

With kernel 3.5.2, I've had better luck with rt2800pci instead of rt2860sta. rt2860sta on this kernel version causes hard locks after a few minutes (for me anyway), whereas the rt2800pci has been working well. I can also use my 5GHz network with the latest driver from compat-wireless.

make sure you install the firmware required for rt2800pci. for gentoo it's the rt2860-firmware package.

check dmesg to see if the driver loads correctly or modprobe -r rt2800pci, then modprobe rt2800pci. if you see no output everything is fine.

I had performance issues with rt2800pci with kernel 3.5.2: tons of dropped packets when receiving data. I recommend upgrading to the latest kernel if possible. Since I can't due to my Nvidia drivers (I need version 295.x and it won't build on newer kernels), I decided to try compat-wireless. Compat-wireless is a way of merging the latest wireless drivers into older kernels like mine.

Make sure you have crda, iw, wireless-regdb, and latest wpa_supplicant.

Download the latest compat-wireless.tar.bz2. If it doesn't help you can also try compat-wireless.snp.tar.bz2 (bleeding-edge). untar.

./scripts/driver-select rt2x00

make. you may have to change kernel options (and recompile the kernel) to get it to compile (I had cfg80211=Y instead of cfg80211=m for example).

make unload (unload all current network modules)

make install

modprobe rt2800pci. hopefully no errors.

ifconfig -a and confirm wlan0 is there.

modinfo rt2800pci, check that the filename is /lib/modules/3.5.2-gentoo/updates/drivers instead of /lib/modules/3.5.2-gentoo/kernel/drivers for example.

now either restart your network init scripts or reboot.

running ifconfig -a after browsing the internet, I noticed I had only 5 RX packet drops instead of 50+. The speed seems much improved.

Connecting to your wireless network:

if you like GUIs use Network-Manager. wicd did not work for me.

configure your wpa_supplicant.conf for your network. you can also use wpa_gui and see if it figures out the correct settings, but you need to set update_config=1 in your wpa_supplicant.conf file.

wpa_supplicant -d -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. Other distros may have the wpa_supplicant.conf file under /etc so use "-c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf"

(for static IP): ifconfig wlan0 <my_computer_static_ip> netmask <netmask> broadcast <broadcast> up

(for static IP): route add default gw <router_ip>

(for dhcp): dhcpcd

if you configured wpa_supplicant correctly, you should be up and running. Now just follow your distro's specific manual network configuration process to make it persist on reboots.

I got "EAPOL: port not authorized" errors in wpa_supplicant so I relied on Network-Manager to configure my wpa_supplicant.conf file.

use iw wlan0 scan to see what network you're connected to.

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