usb-wlan and rt2870sta
 

Hi,

I've bought a usb wireless adapter, called belkin F6D4050 v1, and I can't get it working on Slackware 13.1. It uses the rt2870sta driver, that I suppose already is in the kernel.

modprobe -l rt2870sta gives:
but iwconfig says:
I've blacklisted the rt2800usb driver (as suggested here: http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com...eless-usb.html), but that didn't help. I've also tried with installing this via deb2tgz:
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/firmware-ralink
but that didn't solve the problem neither.

How to make iwconfig showing wlan0?

Thanks in advance for help!

With the module, try
ifconfig wlan0 up

Then, if that sorts it, try without preloading the module.

ifconfig wlan0 up
...gave:
wlan0 ERROR while getting interface flags. No such device

What is meant with "With the module"?


After testing this command I uninstalled the tgz firmware package and downloaded another package with the firmware from http://www.ralinktech.com/support.php?s=2

I extracted the latter package. The content was a directory ( RT2870_Firmare_V22 )containing a license file and .bin file.
I copied the bin file to two locations -- I don't know which location is the best one:
/lib/firmware/rt2870.bin
/lib/firmware/RT2870_Firmare_V22/rt2870.bin
...but that didn't help neither.

...

sorry for this bump post... I posted it by mistake. Is there any possibility to delete posts on this forum?

modprobe whatever module it takes. Check the logs to see if it requests the firmware, and note what it requests. in many boxes, the filename is respective to /lib/firmware
grep /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog for the word 'firmware'

Thanks business_kid! I think the grep command gave some important information....

grep firmware /var/log/messages
...and...
grep firmware /var/log/syslog
...do not give any output, but...
grep rt2870sta/var/log/syslog
...gives multiple lines with this message...
Sep 8 10:22:06 Samsung_N210_Plus kernel: rt2870sta: version magic '2.6.33.4-smp SMP mod_unload 686 ' should be '2.6.33.4. mod_unload 486 '
...and at the end of the output:
Sep 8 10:22:06 Samsung_N210_Plus kernel: rt2870sta: module is from the staging directory, the quality us unknown, you have been warned

Unfortunately I don't exactly understand what this means.

It's complaining that you built the module 'i686' but built that kernel 'i486'. So it is reluctant to run i686 code in a 'i486 box' in case it crashes:-/. I've seen wireless errors, but you'd go a long way before hitting that!

Should I recompile the kernel, since rt2870sta is a part of it?

Hurray! I made it!

During my attempts to get it working I had installed other versions of rt2870sta. After uninstalling these versions I reinstalled the original kernel*txz package and followed the instructions on this site: http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com...eless-usb.html

I plugged the USB stick and rebooted.

As root:
modprobe rt2870
iwconfig wlan0 up
...and it seems to work.

Thanks business_kid for the help.