Ralink drivers issue when upgrading to Wheezy.
 

Hello everyone. I'm Shaun and my brother wants me to install Wheezy on his old Sony VAIO laptop. There's only one problem. We BOTH use wireless cards that are a part of the Ralink RT2870 chipset.

When I tried upgrading to Wheezy a few months ago, I had some problems setting up the drivers. Even after I followed the tutorial on the Debian wiki, I still couldn't connect it to the Internet. What could be the issue? Could it be the kernel because I heard that the Ralink drivers won't compile properly on kernel versions 2.6.35 and up.

Well I want to avoid that issue this time around when I install Wheezy on his laptop, but how do I go about on doing that?

That's actually what I did when I tried upgrading my computer from Squeeze to Wheezy. The results were still the same: Inconclusive.

I downloaded the .deb file, used dpkg to install it, loaded the proper module (rt2800usb), and I still couldn't connect. The weirdest thing is that when I typed in

the terminal said that there was no interface for wlan0. To be sure, I tried bringing up the supposedly nonexistent interface with

My computer said that there was no such interface available.

Have you tried running smxi? Many options are available that may prove useful to you in your efforts. For example, liquorix kernels (incl downgrades), installing ceni to help with network connections, and more. Give it a shot, if you have not already done so.

Uh, do you mind explaining that again? I don't get it.

What hilyard means is that, once the Debian-based distro is installed, go to terminal or console and, as root, type in smxi at the prompt.

If this does not work (as in the command results in a response of something like "checking internet connection . . . ") go to the link and follow instructions on how to install or use the scripts there -- but smxi is the one you want.

This is a useful script that will present a bunch of options after a dist-upgrade, one of which is the drivers needed for various tasks and the kernel option mentioned.

Just do it, and you'll learn soon enough!