I have heard now from alot of peeps that wireless networking on linux is basically appalling (sp?). Despite this, I am determined to get it working since thats the only way I have of accessing the internet in my house. I have an Ralink RT61 wireless card, which windows (and linux) recognise as being a Broadcom card (they use the same chip I guess). In windows the card works perfectly with the drivers built-in but linux is being a pain (predictably).

The problem I have is this - linux recognises the card and loads the module for it automatically (bc43xx I believe) but it has specified it as eth0, for this reason all programs running on my box keep coming back with errors such as "eth0 - device cannot scan" when i try and scan or connect to my wireless network. I tried changing the module's alias to wlan0 in modprobe.conf but I think that just confused the hell out of the computer coz it still came up in gnome as having eth0 with a new device called wlan0 which refused to even initialise (doesn't exist in /proc/network/dev).

Any ideas guys?

Your peeps appear to be clueless newbs. The situation with wireless is a problem created by the hardware manufacturers, not Linux. When you're able to take a piece of unknown and undocumented hardware and write an operating system driver for it, then people will start taking your opinion seriously. Until then, ease up on the Linux bashing at a Linux support web site, if you want people to volunteer to help you.

I've installed the RT61 card by simply following the instructions, and it worked. Did you remember to download and setup the firmware? Are you using a prepackaged driver, or did you build from the CVS nightlies? What distribution are you using?

there are other threads whose topic is similar to this. i suggest you check them out before you pass judgement on linux. there are links at the bottom of this page.

check out the driver source from ralink or serialmonkey

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads
http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Hom...ort/Linux.html

download and compile the driver yourself. the driver module is rt61 and not bc43xx.

if your distro is slackware (mine is), download the precompiled driver package from:

http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slac...rt61/pkg/11.0/

the precompiled driver does work. i'm writing in my laptop with ralink rt61 wireless card up and running.