Can't get Ralink Drivers to work

[DustinCasler]

So I switched to Fedora 9 this week after many issues, crashes, and other general frustrations with windows xp. I am loving the experience thus far with the major exception of wireless networking. I bought a linksys WUSB600N model adapter. I have downloaded the linux drivers from the ralink site but can't seem to get any of the commands from the readme page to work in the terminal. I am extremely new to Linux and also very inexperienced when it comes to anything to do with terminals and I expect that my troubles might be due to mistakes i'm making with the commands. Any help or advice anyone can give me will be GREATLY appreciated.

[Dan]

Hi, Dustin.

I saw your other post as well, and just jumped in to give you a heads-up.

One thread on one issue per customer. I'll leave this one open, but just continue your discussions about this issue here.

Stay cool over there in Dallas today.

Thanks!


Dan

[sej7278]

it would seem its the redhat patches to the rt2x00 driver or the kernel that are breaking ralink wifi as i haven't been able to get my rt2500 working in centos5.2 or any of the fedora9 kernels but it works out of the box on ubuntu 8.04

[bbfuller]

Hello DustinCasler

I've just done a fresh install of F9 on a machine with a RT2500 based card. There is a driver already installed for it in the Fedora kernel and to my surprise, having experienced the failures in F8 that 'sej7278' refers to, I got a functioning card!

Having had problems with it before, I don't know if this is going to be regularly reliable or fail after a few boots. So far it's survived two reboots and a cold start.

Dreadful speed though, it reckons to be connected at 1Mbs about 2m from the access point.

Have you tried checking in NetworkManager to see if it is detecting any wireless networks?

[DustinCasler]

When plugged in, the light won't come on nor will it show any wireless networks. The packaging says that the drivers need to be installed before the adapter will work. I downloaded the linux drivers from the ralink site I just can't seem to make any sense of getting them to work.

[bbfuller]

Hello DustinCasler

I think you are probably headed for trouble here. If there are already kernel drivers included in Fedora for your card the you will have some sort of conflict.

I think you will find from the instructions you have that you are trying to compile a rt2500pci driver.

If you run the command:

lsmod | grep rt2500

I'll be surprised if it doesn't tell you the package is already installed.

However, if you wish to go ahead you'll need to tell us what commands are failing with what error messages to see if we can help.

By the way, ignore the wireless light, they are the last thing developers worry about getting to work.

[DustinCasler]

Ok, I copy and pasted the code you typed and entered it into the terminal. It is saying "lsmod: command not found"

[Dan]

You need to run that command as root. Try this first.

In a terminal:
su -
(provide the root password)
lsmod | grep rt2500


Whups! bbfuller is right here too.

Take it away bb!

[DustinCasler]

I'm logged in as root and its still giving me the same error message about command not found. I copied and pasted exactly what you told me to. Do you think its problems in my system?

[bbfuller]

Hello DustinCasler

As Dan has said, and I suspect it's part of the problem you are having with the package you are trying to compile, when you are logged in as yourself you don't get the path to all the commands included in your environment.

So for that lsmod command to work you would either need to use the full path to the command:

/sbin/lsmod | grep rt2500

or acquire full root rights in your terminal first before issuing the simpler version of the command I gave in my earlier post.

In that case and as Dan wrote:

su -

before you issue the command. That gets you super user rights. Note that the space and the minus sign after the su are important. Without them it only gives you root rights over your ordinary environment.

[DustinCasler]

Ok, I have tried entering both of the above codes in regular, root, and super user. None of them seem to want to execute. This is very strange. I really do appreciate all of the really fast help though.

[DustinCasler]

When i'm in as super user, it won't even give me an error message or anything. It just goes to the next command prompt line as if nothing really happened.

[bbfuller]

Hello DustinCasler

Not that we are particularly interested in the output, but more to see if your terminal works at all, try:

lspci

as root

That should return a list of all your pci hardware:

or

/sbin/lspci

as an ordinary user

[bbfuller]

Hello DustinCasler

Tell me, do you have particular reason to think that the rt2500 driver will work with this card?

Looking around, this is a fairly new wireless 'n' specification card and the rt2500 has been around a long time.

Perhaps if you could run the command:

/sbin/lsusb

(if it works) and post back the part relating to your card we may get closer to what is possible.

[DustinCasler]

lspci works. And when I just do "/sbin/lsmod' alone I get back all of these results


Module Size Used by
nls_utf8 5632 1
udf 71180 0
bridge 46104 0
bnep 14592 2
rfcomm 34576 4
l2cap 22272 16 bnep,rfcomm
bluetooth 47588 5 bnep,rfcomm,l2cap
fuse 41116 3
sunrpc 151412 3
ipt_REJECT 6784 2
nf_conntrack_ipv4 11396 2
iptable_filter 6528 1
ip_tables 13840 1 iptable_filter
ip6t_REJECT 7552 2
xt_tcpudp 6656 2
nf_conntrack_ipv6 15992 2
xt_state 5888 4
nf_conntrack 49748 3 nf_conntrack_ipv4,nf_conntrack_ipv6,xt_state
ip6table_filter 6400 1
ip6_tables 14736 1 ip6table_filter
x_tables 15236 6 ipt_REJECT,ip_tables,ip6t_REJECT,xt_tcpudp,xt_stat e,ip6_tables
cpufreq_ondemand 10124 1
powernow_k8 18308 0
loop 16772 0
dm_multipath 18056 0
ipv6 221660 14 ip6t_REJECT,nf_conntrack_ipv6
snd_hda_intel 336928 5
snd_seq_dummy 6660 0
snd_seq_oss 30364 0
snd_seq_midi_event 9600 1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq 48448 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 10124 3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss 42496 0
snd_mixer_oss 16768 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 67076 3 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm_oss
firewire_ohci 21636 0
snd_timer 21640 2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
firewire_core 34464 1 firewire_ohci
snd_page_alloc 11400 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
k8temp 7936 0
pcspkr 6272 0
hwmon 6300 1 k8temp
snd_hwdep 10500 1 snd_hda_intel
crc_itu_t 5760 1 firewire_core
snd 48312 19 snd_hda_intel,snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,sn d_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd _timer,snd_hwdep
forcedeth 46348 0
soundcore 9288 1 snd
sata_nv 23176 0
sg 31028 0
nvidia 7091264 34
button 10000 0
i2c_nforce2 9472 0
i2c_core 20628 2 nvidia,i2c_nforce2
sr_mod 17064 1
cdrom 32796 1 sr_mod
dm_snapshot 18468 0
dm_zero 5632 0
dm_mirror 26116 0
dm_mod 48980 9 dm_multipath,dm_snapshot,dm_zero,dm_mirror
ata_generic 8964 0
pata_acpi 8320 0
pata_amd 13444 3
libata 127328 4 sata_nv,ata_generic,pata_acpi,pata_amd
sd_mod 25624 3
scsi_mod 120948 4 sg,sr_mod,libata,sd_mod
ext3 108552 2
jbd 40852 1 ext3
mbcache 10116 1 ext3
uhci_hcd 22928 0
ohci_hcd 22404 0
ehci_hcd 32268 0

[DustinCasler]

Ok, after running the lsusb command you put I got this information back

"Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1737:0071 Linksys"

about the port with the adapter in it

[bbfuller]

Hello DustinCasler

I think you've got a card there that isn't very well documented or supported under Linux. This page:

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=29923

seems to reckon that your card, based upon the id numbers above and the Linksys identity, uses the rt2870 driver from the Linksys site. No wonder the rt2500 isn't showing up.

Even then the last post in that thread reckons the user had to modify the Ralink code. Although his post predates the latest release of the Ralink driver.

Wish you luck with that.

[DustinCasler]

Ok, I finally tried using NDIS-Wrapper and Auto-NDIS on the adapter, but I got an error message saying that NDIS-Wrapper doesn't support that adapter. So I took it back to the store and traded it for the Linksys WU54GC which worked the first time I plugged it in without having to modify anything. For anyone else that searches this I would strongly suggest against buying the Linksys WU600N until more support or solutions come out for the N series adapters.

[awhite1159]

DustinCasler,

Good info on the WU54GC. I might take the same route. I have the Belkin USB N type adapter with the RT2870 chip and have not been able to get it to work. I downloaded the RT2870 source code from the RALink website and the compile fails with a function call passing an incorrect number of parameters. I'm trying to find the header file that declares the function and can't seem to find it. In reading the documentation that comes along with this source code, it appears that RALink is pretty confident it will work. I'm not sure if I am doing something wrong since it also warns about incompatible pointer types on the same function call prior to the error. Is there anyone out there that might have some experience with this that can share thier knowledge?

[DustinCasler]

It looks like the only option on getting the ralink drivers is for someone to fix the commands in the readme once you download the driver. I searched everywhere I could think of and had the help of this forum, and two other people who are very experienced with making and working with commands and drivers and such. Good luck on finding something. If you do definitely post it. But as for me, being as new to Linux and inexperienced in the terminal as I am, I finally decided that being able to get online was more important than having the best class of wireless adapter. Hopefully once the N series have been around a little while longer there will be support for them. I'm sure someone's already working on it.

[DustinCasler]

Also, awhite, in case you or anyone else reading decides to go with the WU54GC. I have got better reception results without using the USB extension cord that comes with the adapter. I get noticeably better signal just having the adapter itself plugged into the back of my computer rather than having the adapter plugged into the cord and on top of my tower or monitor or anywhere else. I also noticed that for the first half day or so of having the adapter the signal would fluctuate heavily and at one point even stayed at 29% for a little while, but after a few restarts and about a day I have been able to hold a consistently good signal.