WNDA 4100 (NetGear N900) Wireless Dual Band USB Adapter

[Immortal Nexus]

Greetings all.

This is my very first post in these forums. I installed Ubuntu 11.10 about a week ago, and I have to say that I am utterly in love with Linux. I learn and adapt very quickly, and having reached my breaking point of tolerance with Windows (in any version), I finally took the plunge into the Linux world. I've spent every free moment since install exploring and familiarizing myself with this amazing OS. I can say with absolute definitiveness now that I will NEVER go back to Winblows.

Having said that, there is one piece of hardware that Ubuntu did not detect, and presently remains useless : My NetGear N900 Dual Band Wireless Adapter. I've been scourering forums and websites looking for a means of getting this piece of hardware working with 11.10, to no avail. I've tried fake installing the drivers via Wine (actually I even downloaded the source code for Wine 1.3 and modified it for better USB detection, complied it, then installed it, without success), and even installing on another computer, then copying the files, then using Windows Wireless Drivers (Ndiswrapper) to find the INF file to make use of the drivers, without success. No matter what I do, this adapter is not able to be utilized.

The adapter, even though it cannot be used, is indeed being detected by Ubuntu, as the following info verifies:

lsusb:

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0846:9012 NetGear, Inc.

It is a Ralink-based chipset.

If anyone happens to know if there is any possible way of getting this adapter to function under Ubuntu 11.10, I'd be ridiculously grateful if they could point me in the right direction. If there is not yet support for this adapter, is there a way to request support somewhere?

Thanks much for any suggestions or advice.

[praseodym]

Hi,

AFAIK there is no Linux driver there for this device. See here:

http://www.wikidevi.com/wiki/Netgear_WNDA4100

Two possibilities:

1. Ask Ralink, which of there drivers may work, and compile it by hand (we will help you )
   
2. Try the windows driver with ndiswrapper: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...er/Ndiswrapper

Any driver disk? Something on it looking like "Linux"?

[Immortal Nexus]

Hi,

AFAIK there is no Linux driver there for this device. See here:

http://www.wikidevi.com/wiki/Netgear_WNDA4100

Two possibilities:

1. Ask Ralink, which of there drivers may work, and compile it by hand (we will help you )
   
2. Try the windows driver with ndiswrapper: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...er/Ndiswrapper

Any driver disk? Something on it looking like "Linux"?

Thanks for the reply. I did already try Ndiswrapper with the Windows drivers, without success. So, if I were to go about compiling my own drivers, how might I begin this task? It's interesting...NetGear has no Linux support, yet Ralink does have a tar.bz2 file for Linux to compile. I will certainly do my own homework on how to compile these drivers, but any assistance would be immensely appreciated.

[praseodym]

In 11.10 you need to copy this file:

sudo cp /etc/modules.conf /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper.conf

Check:

ndiswrapper -l
dmesg | grep ndis
iwconfig
lsmod

[Immortal Nexus]

In 11.10 you need to copy this file:

sudo cp /etc/modules.conf /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper.conf

Check:

ndiswrapper -l
dmesg | grep ndis
iwconfig
lsmod

I've pretty much set it into my head at the moment to build Linux native drivers from source provided by Ralink, but I'm feeling a bit in over my head at the moment, as I need to set variables that I don't know enough about yet to set properly. I've attached the readme file for compiling the source. I've been trying to follow instructions for compiling drivers for another USB adapter that also uses a Ralink chipset, but when in the driver source directory I'm unable to ./configure or sudo make. I'm determined to do this...lol.

[Immortal Nexus]

If this helps at all (to see the structure and content of the driver root directory), here is the tarball from Ralink's site for this chipset.

[darawk]

To anyone who tried everything in this thread and is still having trouble with this, there is a bug in the way this driver handles sk_buff structures on 64-bit systems that was causing a kernel panic when any packets over a certain size were sent. I wrote a patch for it that you can grab here:

https://github.com/ashaffer/rt3573sta

I'll email ralink and hopefully they'll have an official version of this soon, but in the meantime you can use mine.

[ericosaurus]

Very cool, thanks for posting this darawk.

I know it's hard to say, but do you think that bug could have caused a recurring system crash after a day or two of use? That's a problem I've been having with the n900.

[darawk]

Very cool, thanks for posting this darawk.

I know it's hard to say, but do you think that bug could have caused a recurring system crash after a day or two of use? That's a problem I've been having with the n900.

That seems like it could be possible. For me the bug manifested almost immediately - I could connect to my local network, and I could send ping packets out, but as soon as I tried to send anything larger it would crash. If you grep your syslog for 'panic' and you see something that looks like this:

[ 148.889884] skbuff: skb_over_panic: text:ffffffff81568980 len:1523 put:105 head:ffff8801d01a7000 data:ffff8801d01a70ac tail:0xd01a769f end:0x640 dev:<NULL>

Then my patch should help you, otherwise your problem may be different. Either way it's probably worth a try with my version if you're having consistent problems.

[dalaron]

Following chili555's instruction on page 4 of this thread I was able to get my adapter to work on my PC.

One day ago, however, it just decided to stop working for me. A disconnected from network notification would flash up when I logged in.

The solution I found was to repeat the last few steps of chili555's instructions:

 
sudo su 
make 
make install 
modprobe rt3573sta 
exit

I think I was repeating some un-necessary steps, but my wirless is working again anyway!