Hi

I have a old laptop Dell C600 PIII 800mhz 256mb RAM 20Gb HDD and a floppy drive. It has 1 USB port and no wifi card.

I bought the Belkin F6D4050 v1 usb wireless adapter so that I could use it on the above laptop and connect to my wireless network at home.
The Belkin USB wireless adapter has a Ralink xchipset

There was no specific Linux driver available but a workaround for an old driver worked. Some changes to the code and compiling gets the wireless adapter to work.
I have installed Arch on the laptop. I compiled it and its working fine

Questions
1.Arch linux releases new image only once or twice a year
I have downloaded the latest available arch image and built froms scratch.
When I update Arch (as it is a rolling release) the kernel also gets updated and the compiled driver fails to work. I have to recompile again for the new kernel.
Is there a way I can compile this driver in the existing Arch or any other distro kernel and use as long as I can without updating so I do not have to recompile again

Thanks
Ninad

You can turn the driver into a kernel module and compile it into a binary. From there you can just keep the binary mymodule.o and install it into the kernel. Although... now that I think about it you need kernel headers to compile it so it will probably only work for that version of kernel. Anyway if you get ahold of the binary then you can use the insmod and modprobe commands respectively to enable/install it.

Recently I've found module examples and tutorials...
RTL8139.C
How to: Compile Linux kernel modules
modprobe

Not sure if that approach is the best one but I should think that it is a good idea to turn it into a module to ease installation in the future.