Slashdot Mirror

Have wireless "issues" been fixed with this release.

I have a laptop with generic realtek rt2500 wifi hardware.
For many kernel releases I have to compile seperate drivers (Legacy serialmonkey) because the "stock" drivers are woefully unstable.
I either lose my connection, painfully slow( have tried the "rate 54" fix) or I cannot reconnect to my network at all.

I don't mind compiling seperate drivers (a huge benefit of open source stuff & Linux) but I am concerned how long I will be able to do this (E.g. something changes in the kernel makes the "external" driver break - in fact actual development of the legacy drivers has ceased - http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)?

I know I should not be moaning about this but this issue has been around for ages and seems to affect a lot of hardware.

This is my only niggle with Linux and I am grateful for everything. Computing become much more interesting and fun again.

Huge thanks to Linus and the kernel developers.

The rt2x00 project has to a certain degree solved Ralink chipset problems. I access the internet with a Linksys WUSB54GC USB adaptor which runs the RT73 chipset, and I use rt2x00's legacy rt73 driver since rt73usb in the mainline kernel is 1) lacking in features and 2) not as stable IMHO.

That said, I don't know how Ralink's chipsets work on netbooks. I have a Dell Inspiron 1525n with that Intel wireless chipset mentioned above (no problems there, either). If you're having problems with the Ralink drivers on a netbook such as the Eee PC, though, I'd look into the rt2x00 project for some possible answers.

WPA-PSK works fine on most rt2500 cards. The only problem is that rt2500 doesn't use wpasupplicant, but a combination of iwpriv and iwconfig to get things going. I find that it only works under WPA with TKIP encryption. These "legacy" drivers are working rather well for most users.

There is a project to rewrite the driver from scratch, get it mainlined in the kernel, and use the standard interfaces so that the card can be used with NetworkManager and the like. Unfortunately, for all their work they haven't much to show for it. They've changed 802.11 stacks several times, the drivers are still very, very buggy, etc. Hopefully their temporary hiatus will give them a fresh perspective when they tackle completing the new drivers.

If you are interested in emailing me, I might be able to help you. I've had an rt2500 card for 2+ years, and I've ran into about every problem they have.

You also seem to be in the same boat a lot of people moving to GNU/Linux are. Things are rocky until you make the commitment to buying hardware that is well supported. I had a lot of the same problems, but now I wouldn't go back to Windows if you paid me.

The rt2500 driver is plainly shit. It was inherited from GPLed source from the Ralink team (I suppose we can at least thank them for the inital code). It doesn't support any "standard" interfaces. No WPA supplicant support or wireless extensions, etc.

There has been a complete rewrite underway for about 2 years now to use these standard interfaces and it hasn't really gone anywhere. I thank Mark Wallis and such for their hard work, but they don't have the time to work on this driver. You can try it out by installing rt2x00-source. I've tried it on Debian several times and I can't get the thing to work.

Thanks for the suggestion, but the driver will detect the dongle fine. It's actually an issue of "there just ain't a good driver." The driver that ships with Ubuntu 6.10 is an old, busted version of the open-source driver. I could just upgrade the driver, but it's only available through CVS. I'm not a developer, and know very little about CVS. It doesn't help that versions after December 2006 apparently have known issues, so you have pull from an older date in the CVS repository - I've got no idea how to do that. I could use the driver that Ralink made for the chipset, but it doesn't support the Linux Wireless Extensions (wext) (oddly enough, it's also full of bugs itself). It has it's own configuration utility. That means I don't get to use things like wpasupplicant or xsupplicant.

So, my solution is to use ndiswrapper and the Windows version of the driver. Ndiswrapper supports wext, so I've been trying to use wpasupplicant through that. This works well enough for access points that are open or just have WEP encryption, but completely fails to properly authenticate with my school's RADIUS server. I'd like to test WPA-PSK, but I don't have an access point that supports it. I don't know if I haven't set up my config file properly or what I'm trying to do just isn't supported.

The real crime here is advertising that the damn thing is "Linux Compatible." Yeah, you can use it under Linux, but it doesn't support the one standard that really matters (wext is how most of the newer wireless tools communicate and do their thing). For what it's worth, it works brilliantly with my school's network under Windows with SecureW2, so it should be possible to do it under Linux, I'm just not a huge guru that can make it work.

Dear Greg, rather than waiting until Ralink crosses your blog, I'll point you immediately to http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ The rt2x00 team is developing Linux drivers for RT2500 and other Ralink wireless chipsets since over 2 years. Yet no release happened since over a year, so one wonders how long it will take until a stable version is completed, integrated in the main Linux tree, and in distros. If over 15 months ago, you would have specifically buyed a barebone laptop in order to be able to choose a wireless card with good [potential] Linux support, and chosen one which had already GPL drivers from Ralink iself, was also used by tens of thousands of Linux users, and was Linux Journal's 2005 "Product of the Year", you would definitely wish that the Linux community had made this announcement sooner...or just that it stopped wating until someone knocks at the door. NB: Despite the previous sentence, I am not blaming the Linux community. I just think Greg needs to be brought back to the ground.

I've picked up one of these cards for wardriving (I'm a complete noobie unfortunately)
These chaps have been pretty helpful and the drives (iirc) work out of the box for my rt2500 minipci under ubuntu 6.10
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php?titl e=Main_Page

I had an intel ipw220 but frankly as a noobie, with or without howto's it was nothing short of a fucking nightmare to get working with WPA under ubuntu from 5.04 to about 6.0 if I recall (and it's still not simple, out of the box yet)

I also have an orinoco gold I got from ebay, specifically for wardriving, comes with an external aerial - that thing is the business, just plug and go - good stuff, chipset, sorry - can't recall - I think it's atheros(?)

$ lspci | grep "Network"
00:14.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI

Hey look at that, what a coincidence...

PS. Last time I checked (which was a while ago admittedly), it was hell to set up. There are drivers from the manufacturer, and there's a project to write open drivers, with at least two different series of drivers with no clear directions on which to use or how to set everything up in userspace. I haven't even bothered getting it up and running. So I'm lazy, big deal.

I just bought a Turion AMD64 laptop a couple of weeks ago. I'm dual-booting 64-bit OpenSuSE 10.2 and Windows XP Pro 64. Only problem has been with wireless. (Thank you, Acer, for including a wireless card for which there are apparently no 64-bit drivers.)

Wireless with Win64 was solved with a Gigabyte GN-WB01GS USB dongle. The 64-bit driver's on the CD, which won't autorun and complains that "this CD is for a different format than what your computer uses" or some such garbage. Open it in Windows Explorer, navigate to the Utility folder, and run setup.exe, however, and it offers to install the 64-bit driver.

Wireless for the Linux side I'm still working on. I use ndiswrapper to run the Broadcom card that came with my 32-bit Acer laptop, and it works a treat there, but doesn't seem to do so for the card in the 64-bit machine. It also doesn't work for anything USB (silly me).

The GN-WB01GS (supposedly) uses an RT2570 chipset, for which a Linux driver is available courtesy of the rt2x00 Project. Their source built fine once I remembered to put a symlink in my /lib/modules/2.6.18-2.34-default/build directory. The driver loads (at least modprobe says it does), but nothing shows up in iwconfig.

I may just wind up buying another WiFi card. Otherwise, no complaints here.

While I actually think TFA is virtually useless, I understand that people want better wireless support for their various open source OS's. Intel's drivers for this are really quite open when compared to most others, but if you want drivers that are more open than Intel's, choose ones with the RT2400, RT2500, RT2570, and RT61 chipsets by RaLink. The drivers were open-sourced last year and have progressed quite well. Find more info at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page and http://sourceforge.net/projects/rt2400.

The rt2500 driver has been in Ubuntu since 5.10. Perhaps noone's asked them to develop a PC card edition. Careful checking indicates that the project has moved to http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/. They have phpBB which mught be able to help with Linux support.

If you use the rt2500 cvs driver it works great even on smp systems for Linux. I was using the rt2x00 becuase until late May the rt2500 driver would lockup SMP systems and Fedora only has SMP kernels for the x86_64 systems now. I don't use the rt2x00 driver anymore because it has some problems. However, I have not lookedinto it for about a month. Just go to http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Down loads and grap the latest rt2500 nightly tarball. Also if you don't want it to mess up the fglrx driver from livna you need to change the install directory in the makefile otherwise it will remove the directory the fglrx kernel mod is in. After that you can use all the standard tools to configure the wireless card. However it is the rt2x00 driver that appears to be destined for the kernel since it is built from the ground up to be used in SMP systems.

apt-get install module-assistant rt2500-source
module-assistant prepare
module-assistant auto-install rt2500-source

As identity0 pointed out in an adjacent post, Ralink released their own drivers for this chipset under the GPL, although I believe this has been thoroughly re-worked for the current community releases. This driver is shipped by a lot of distros now, and cards using it will probably be detected at install time by Suse, Ubuntu, Mandrake & Fedora Core. I find it very stable.

Ned.

That's just crap. Linux has had ralink drivers for a long time already:

http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

ZyDas provided an open source driver for their
USB 802.11G chips.

Ralink appears to have done the same thing.

Since the drivers are still somewhat in their infancy, your mileage may vary, but it appears that both vendors (Which comprise many of the USB thumb sized adapters out there...) have stepped up to the plate and provided source and technical data to back it up with. There's been decent reports of usability with the Hawking model using ZyDas' chipset. At least for now, devices like the Hawking HWU54G adapter are largely supported in some mode that is remotely usable. I suspect that by the end of year that the driver sets for these two vendors' chips will end up in the kernel proper.

Unless you use SMP! And who doesn't with hyperthreaded processors everywhere?

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/It's _Broke

I bought the Belkin one of these because it was the cheapest locally and the driver was included out of the box by SuSE. I get it home and find that the driver is bugged and so excluded from SMP kernels. More digging and I find that the wrapper solutions have the same problem.

So it's switch off SMP or use the card as a doorstop... holds the door open nicely.

Ralink is a company which manufactures the chipsets for dozens of popular 802.11x devices. They do indeed provide drivers (and source) for linux:

http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm

they also provide a nice table, with links to the manufacturers

http://ralink.rapla.net/

AND they have an open source project, as well, to support the drivers!

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

check it out. it's cool.

Self-righteousness aside, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16833130111 + http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page is a winning combination. It's been rock-solid for me on my mythbox under very heavy loads.

Plus the chipset maker (Railink) are good folks and release their specs + drivers to the F/OSS community.

I recently bought a wireless card because it was cheap after rebate at CompUSA. I was glad to see that the card had open linux drivers from the chipset maker and that there was a community project to improve them. Mine is based on the rt2500 chipset but there are others supported by the driver. You can find more info at their site.

Rt2x00

I haven't had any problems using my card with Scientific Linux 4.

As long as you don't need WPA, get a card with an rt2x00 series chip. The drivers work fine, though they are not yet good enough to be merged into the kernel. http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/

And as long as you use the 2.4 series of kernel. I have been unable to compile the driver for 2.6.15.

As long as you don't need WPA, get a card with an rt2x00 series chip. The drivers work fine, though they are not yet good enough to be merged into the kernel. http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/

My biggest problem was to know in advance what I'd buy. Most cards don't come with chipset specifications, and - like with webcams - vendors like to change chipsets between different versions.

So, I bought a Linksys Wireless-G USB, thinking it is a Prism2 chipset which is well supported and has RFMON. It turned out, version 4 has a Ralink chipset which seems not to work flawlessy with ndiswrapper.

Fortunately, these great guys at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com have native driver that supports RFMON and native linux wireless extensions (unlike linux-wlan-ng that is... mmhmm... different). So far the drivers are quite stable and I'm hoping they will improve the remaining glitches (like setting a new MAC address).

Newer Prism54 chipsets are not supported. Intersil, who made the Prism chipsets, were bought by Conexant, and they have always been among the worst to get information from. The Prism54 driver project are working on reverse engineering, and make much progress, but don't hold your breath. And don't buy a card with Prism54 chipset just now, because they all use one of the newer unsupported revisions.

Ralink, as you say, have good support. Thanks to them, I have working wireless in Linux on an old Mac. Drivers are at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com.

I'm not quite happy with configuration yet. My setup works fine, but it's static. I'd like a nice GUI for choosing APs, setting passwords,etc., when on the move. There is a utility for the old v.1 RT2500 driver, and it seems to work, but I didn't quite get internet access when trying to use it (I did get access to the LAN, though). For now, I use an ordinary network configuration (/etc/networking/interfaces in Debian). It works, and I'm happy. I don't think everyone else would be.

A perfect example of FUD. Who forced Ralink off the market after they released Linux drivers for their 802.11 cards?

To get wireless usb running with Linux, buy a wireless dongle with a Ralink chipset in it and use the drivers at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

For example, I bought one of these,
http://newsite.pagecomputers.com/store/Product_acc essoriesx.asp?catalog_name=Unclassified&category_n ame=32g32c302s1287&product_id=624257 , grabbed, compiled (very easy), and installed the rt2570 sources, and the thing worked perfectly as a network device under both Suse 9.3 and Fedora 4.

The rt2x00 web site said that the drivers would soon be integrated into every kernel release, so it may be in Suse 10 already. Check subdirectories of /lib/modules for the existence of rt2570.ko. If it's in there, then you shouldn't have to download/compile anything -- the usb dongle will just work.

It's fud fud fud fud. Consperiacy bullshit, I figure.

I LOVE Linux. Long time Debian user, I know that I simply couldn't use computers and be as happy with them if I was stuck with only choosing Windows and propriatory applications.

I am a GNU, Free Software, ra-ra-ra type of guy. I probably seem like a nut to many people.

But I don't beleive that it's a consperiacy against Linux. I beleive it's just complacency, laziness, apathy, and other crap like that.

It's not that they care and conspire, it's that they don't give a shit and MS nudges here and there very rarely.

Hardware manufacturers work their asses off making sure the everything works with Windows well. They generally dont' do jack shit about Linux because it doesn't contribute to their bottom line. (it could if they felt like it. No linux support = no Linux-related money = no reason to support linux = no linux support, etc etc etc.)

This is why it's important to support hardware manufacturers that support Linux. Stuff like Ralink-using Wifi cards that use the rt2500 and related chipsets. http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

And specificly requesting Linux support is the only way to go. Seriously. Buying random hardware and expecting it to work in Linux or expecting that your Dell laptop will work 'just because' is foolish.

This guy is spreading fud. There are certainly hardware companies that dislike the idea of free software. They dislike having to tell end-users how to use the hardware or releasing minimal REAL documentation on the hardware. Well then, fuck them. Don't buy their shit and if you do don't cry when you can't get it to work with ndiswrapper.

PS. Don't buy wifi cards with Conextent, Broadcom, Texas Instruments using chipsets. Avoid them like the plague. Modern 802.11g that work in Linux well are Intel Wifi setups and Ralink rt2x00 based chipsets. Intel 'Sonoma' platform with Intel Video and Intel wifi should work well in a modern Linux setup. Avoid ATI and Nvidia if you can, and if you can't and need the 3d horsepower always choose Nvidia.

What Linux needs for the 'average' user however is pre-installed support from a major manufacturer. The most likely canidate would be HP right now, but it seems to me that it's going to take a relative unkown to realy break through and start making buckets of money from this sort of thing. Maybe a successfull company that produces hardware specialized for Linux clustering or server work can step up to the bat and do it. (not talking about IBM.)

It is certainly possible to get a very nice computer for inexpensive that will work in Linux without having to resort to e-crappo hardware to make it cheap.

Under Ubuntu Linux 5.10 any card based on the rt2500 chipset will work right out of the box. I have 2 such devices one pci(for a desktop) and one pcmcia (for my laptop). You don't have to do anything special to set them up. The installer does not recognize the wireless nics at install time. So be sure to have an regular ethernet nic available so you can do the install time updates. Once you boot up into gnome for the first time, you will be able to configure and select your wireless devices via the gnome network manager flawlessly.

I purchased both wireless nics from newegg. The rt2500 devices are usually under 30$.

I use the GIGABYTE GN-WPKG wireless pci card, it is 20$ at newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16839121008

here is the rt2500 project page:

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

you can find a list of compatible hardware from there.

List of brand/model numbers with the chipset: http://ralink.rapla.net

RALink's own GPL linux driver here.

Further development of RALink's codebase here.

I have a Belkin F5D7050($40) working like a charm on Linux with the driver from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page. I'm also trying to use this on Mac OSX 10.4.2 with the driver from http://www.ralinktech.com/ but it keeps trashing Tiger like a windoze box. It either gives me the beachball of death a few moments after I start downloading something, or a nice grey multilangual thingy telling me I need to restart. Anyone else has this problem or it's back to 10.3.9? No problems there.

There is an open source project which is developing the ralink drivers further, see http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page. And yes, the driver works on 2.6 too, although it's not merged.

I recently bought an A-link WL54H PCI card (about 30 EUR), which has the rt2500 chip. See http://ralink.rapla.net/ for a big list of devices with the rt2500 chip.

Oh, and you'll want the drivers :-)

I used MADWIFI in my old laptop, with two PC card adapters, which the laptop randomly fried. Thanks, HP/Compaq!

While I absolutely love the job that the devs do on that project, in hindsight I'm not so confident in the Atheros hardware---and that's not because of the two incidents mentioned above. I have seen many reports that the Atheros has the shortest range of all the 802.11g chipsets. And it would be better if the project could be completely GPL, but because the Atheros radio is software-controlled, that part can't be GPL due to FCC standards.

In my new laptop, I have a Ralink 2500-series card. They apparently have had Linux drivers for a while, and in December they released them under the GPL.

Ralink's drivers always had the source code available, they were just under a non-GPL license. Unfortunately, they included an md5.c file that had a big GPL declaration at the top of it. Oops. Well, at least they're GPL now.

Anyhow, RaLink's official drivers are somewhat akin to useless junk, so there's been a fork of the code made that's considerably more stable, if you use the CVS version:
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page