wireless usb - rt73
 

first post here -
I have a linksys wusb54gc wireless usb dongle, with ralink chipset. I have tried quite a few distributions in the past couple days (slackware, mandriva, kubuntu, pclinuxos, vector, puppy, gentoo, mepis, and soon to try debian and opensuse).

In all except for Mandriva, I had to load ndiswrapper to get the wireless drivers to load. Mandriva, interestingly, automatically detected and installed rt73 drivers, and it worked right off the bat. Even when I tried to load rt73 in the others, none of them worked, and I had to use ndiswrapper.

question - is there a config file(s) that I can copy (or should be looking for deltas) from Mandriva into Slackware(or other) to get it to use the rt73 driver?

thanks-
ed

(I also read some snippets about rt73 not working in 'SMP' enabled kernels; no clue if that's a hint??)

you may have to compile a kernel module;
look here: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/...itle=Main_Page

if you use stock kernels you can get precompiled ones from http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/rt73/

ex625,

The SErial Monkey driver works, and I mean it WORKS. I've been using it with Slackware for the past week and it has been rock-solid. I'm using a Belkin F5D7050 with the rt73 chipset.

You don't need any old config files, just compile according to the instructions in the INSTALL/README files. At first I was getting "network unreachable" so I modified rc.inet1.conf: I commented out the stuff for eth0 and put in the info for my ESSID, iwpriv settings, etc. into the fields in that file.

Welcome to slackware -- you will learn so much more about Linux using Slackware. Get into the configuration files and get your hands dirty and you will feel a lot more knowledgeable about computing and Linux in particular for having done it.

Joel

Thanks for the help, guys. I will have to check again tonight, but I think the module you pointed me to is one that I tried (along with the ralink one from their website, though from reading posts, the serialmonkey one is supposed to be better). It compiled easily and installed correctly (well, without any glaring errors that I could tell). I will, however, try looking in the rc.inet1 file like you suggest; and hopefully will be able to give a better description of the exact issue with some output displays.

I just trashed my slackware partitions in order to try some other distributions, but I now have read enough to figure out how to set up multiple partitions for a multi-boot system, and plan to re-install it again tonight, along w/ opensuse and debian. Even though it's not workin yet, I expect slackware to remain in my short list for my final system. Seems pretty flexible.

thanks again -
ed

if you want to try rt2x00 you'll have to use a recent 2.6 kernel and patch the kernel source. either use the patch here or this one. ( i used one of these, but i don't recall which one)
these patches are planned to go upstream in either 23 or 22.

to compile a kernel get some sources from a mirror, install ( or unpack) them , patch the kernel ( see Documentation/applying-patches.txt ) , ;make xconfig (here you'll have to select the mac80211 stack in ?drivers/net? ), make , 'make modules_install' and finally 'make install'

Good Luck

Why use that patch (which is for Intel's IPW driver family obviously) when we're talking about Ralink chipsets here?

Eric

i'm talking from memory here. i think one of them ( more likely the first one) contains the complete mac80211 stack with associated drivers. the rt2x00 development is taking place in the wireless-dev git-tree and isn't made public on serialmonkey's site anymore.