Trouble with Linksys WUSB100 RangePlus Wireless USB Network Adapter ver. 2

Ramurd · 11-07-2010, 09:03 AM

Hi all,

I'm getting totally clueless, so I hope you can help me out.
Recently I setup a nice wireless network at my place. The laptops (among this one, a Slackware64 13.1) could connect just fine, as good as out of the box.

For my pc I bought an USB dongle, which I thought would go just fine. So I plugged it in and saw in /var/log/messages an USB Netowrk adapter was plugged in. (Sheer joy at that point)

Then, to see if it was picked up automagically I tried wpa_supplicant and wpa_gui, but to my dismay there was no wlan0 adapter, nor any other wireless adapter. Glad with this laptop I went searching on the net, and read that these adapters use the rt2870 chipset. So I went loading the modules, but no reaction there.

I went searching more, and found out that the rt2870 chipset are those adapters with USB id 1737:0070, but the adapter I have is a version 2, meaning it has USB id 1737:0078

Finding nothing on the webs, other than some ubuntu howto's, I went and installed ndiswrapper, installed the xp driver from the cd that came with the adapter.

Code:

# ndiswrapper -l
rt2870 : driver installed
        device (1737:0078) present

So this is still an rt2870 chipset, and going by ndiswrapper the adapter is present and drivers are loaded. But still wpa_supplicant doesn't see the thing...

What's going wrong? Why am I still not seeing any wireless adapter?

What's the driver I should load? (ndiswrapper? or is there something native after all?)

Code:

# lsusb | grep Linksys
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1737:0078 Linksys WUSB100 RangePlus Wireless USB Network Adapter ver. 2

# lsmod | head
Module               Size  Used by
ndiswrapper        230984  0
crc_ccitt            1331  0

# cat /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper.conf
alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

stress_junkie · 11-07-2010, 09:34 AM

Some time ago I looked into wpa_supplicant on Slackware. I found that the only wpa_supplicant available in that distro at that time would only work on one specific wifi chip set. This was about four years ago.

Ramurd · 11-09-2010, 09:31 AM

wpa_supplicant, as far as I could find out, does not really support a chipset, instead it works on the kernel drivers provided either by a kernel module / compiled into the kernel or an external way (such as ndiswrapper)

The question I still have is why there is no wireless interface showing up when I either install / load the rt2870sta module or the load the driver via ndiswrapper. Neither appears to be giving me a new device on which I could perform furher operations.

Ramurd · 11-09-2010, 12:10 PM

I found a solution here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ht=wusb100+fix, about the 6th post.

This delivered me a wlan0 device, which was recognized as a wireless ethernet device. So far so good... Next would be to get the thing up, as it does not seem to respond to the iwconfig up command... Probably because I noticed the mac address was 00:00:00:00 I'll search on and will inform when I have the thing up and running...

Ramurd · 11-10-2010, 06:47 AM

Finally got it working, I do have a wlan0 device and it does connect... but only to the router of one neighbour or another that has a completely insecure network.
My system does not find any other wireless networks around, although my laptop shows quite a few more, but those are all secured one way or another.

I bet the key is in encryption, somehow the current driver does not seem to support encryption the right way. If someone has a clue and can point me how I can get the encryption working as well, I'd be very grateful!

Ramurd · 11-11-2010, 09:00 AM

Changed a few things in my configuration:

Changed the router's frequency from 5GHz to 2.4GHz
Loaded rt2800usb module(s) as well as rt2870sta
echo "1737 0078" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/rt2870/new_id

Now I see my router and connect just fine.

Some things just amaze me...