USB wireless dongle detected as a scanner??

Lisa_T · 06-20-2006, 06:50 PM

OK, specs first:
PCLinuxOS Minime .93; kernel 2.6.13 (I think that's right; it was a deliberate downgrade from .15 to prevent crashing on boot after dongle was plugged in)
IBM X20 12GBHDD 128ram PIII 600mhz
Belkin F5D7050 rt73 chipset/driver

Problem:
Can't boot with dongle plugged in: hangs on rausb0, even with the older kernel
(no dongle: rausb0 'detected' ok- what is this?? Nothing's plugged in, except the usb lead extender)

From XFCE: the dongle will plug in with no difficulty, and under .13 it won't crash the system. It's even detected in hardware- under scanner, although it's correctly identified as a wireless adaptor, but because it's listed under scanner I don't seem to be able to run ndiswrapper.

I gather this happens with other equipment- eg, webcams- but I've still not seen a solution.

Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance.

-=Graz=- · 06-21-2006, 05:36 AM

Hi There, so the dongle has which chipset ? it is a ralink73 or something? i dont know this particular one... but, I have a rt2570 (dlink usb) and i use the driver from serialmonkey project : http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Is this the driver you use? My machine used to hang when i 'removed' the device..
i dont use it much now but from memory i had to remove the rt2570 module, then do ifconfig rausb0 down and then pull the dongle out..

Im not sure that they really helps at all . but. yeah

Lisa_T · 06-21-2006, 07:20 AM

I'm not using any driver at the moment because the dongle isn't recognised as a wireless device so there's no real point! If I can get it seen as a dongle then I can worry about the drivers and move on...

Essentially this is tinkering. I have a perfectly good ethernet connection and the laptop in question has no working battery, so the whole idea of it being wireless is slightly academic! However, if I could get the wireless dongle working AND use it to get online, I'd probably invest in a replacement battery for it.

-=Graz=- · 06-22-2006, 02:54 AM

If you boot the machine up and insert the dongle, type #dmesg and post the output here..
Or - insert the dongle and type #tail /var/log/messages (hopefully this exists in your distro) .. post the output here...

Often it will recognise a USB device (can list as allsorts of devices) and then when you install the driver for that device next time it will load the driver on insertion and away we go