Ubuntu 12.04 beta2 issues with Ralink RT2800 PCI loses connection

[Bushi86]

OK now I'm just confused. I went ahead and bought a 3RD wifi card (this one is a D-link DWA-556 with an Atheros chipset) to try out, and it's acting the exact same! I decided to give up for the day and boot back into Windows, and I'm having the same symptoms there!? For science, I shut down and threw my old card back in (the RNX-N300NX) to see if it was still working in Windows, but it was acting the same!

I should mention that I've also tried two different routers, so I don't think that's the issue. My laptop (Macbook Pro running OS 10.7.4) has 100% reception on my computer desk, so it's not a problem with range...wifi on my desktop was running perfectly fine in Windows before I added a new SSD and dual-booted Ubuntu.

WTF is going on?? I'm going to start a new thread since my issue seems to be bigger than the Ralink 2800 modules.

[mathfreak]

I switched over to ndiswrapper and everything seems to be pretty stable so far. If you're curious, I basically followed the instructions here. The only real change I did was to create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-wlan.conf that contains the lines

blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2860sta

Then when I rebooted it worked. It's been stable so far with no cutting out. I'll see how it continues.

Well, the ndiswrapper driver is exhibiting the same behavior. I'm beginning to suspect that it's just a huge coincidence and not realted to 12.04. Ugh.

[mathfreak]

Well, the ndiswrapper driver is exhibiting the same behavior. I'm beginning to suspect that it's just a huge coincidence and not realted to 12.04. Ugh.

Actually, that may have been a hiccup in the router. I've stress tested my wireless for four days and haven't had a another problem. It appears that using ndiswrapper solved this for me.

[hernacar]

Hi, neilhuang, just wanted to thank you for posting the solution to my issue. I followed the steps you posted and it worked right away. I also took the liberty of linking the post and copying the steps in my personal blog so I could reference this information quicker in the future (giving you full credit for actually doing the research and stuff ).

Thanks again for your help!

[neilhuang]

Sure. No problem.

For those who don't have this scripted yet, I've posted a script that I currently use.
No guarantees, but I run it everytime my Ubuntu updates the kernel and breaks my wireless.

It follows my previous post #9 pretty much line by line.
Feel free to tweak it to your heart's content to make it work the way you want.

Just a few pre-req's that the script assumes:
1. The wireless driver of RT2860STA has already been downloaded and extracted at /home/________/wireless_card_driver
2. You've tried the steps manually first to understand how the process works and to get it working so you can fix the script to make it work for yourself for the future.

Blessings,
-Neil

[Skybolt83JL]

Does anyone have the rt2860sta driver working on kernel 3.2.0-25 x86_64?

It will load ok without the nic installed, but locks my system up hard with the nic in place.

[neilhuang]

Not sure who still uses this driver, but I find it to be the root cause of a lot of my system freezes.

For now, I've removed the blacklist on the original wireless driver and using that. It seems to work fine now.

At least, it doesn't cause my system to freeze anymore. Will need to dig deeper.

[txavi]

Ok.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1958059

[bearman83]

Just a small update with relationship to this post.

So on ubuntu 12.04 i had to use the solution provided by neilhuang and install the rt2860sta driver which worked just fine. The standard rt2800pci driver would drop and disconnect continously.

Two days ago i upgraded to quantal and i noticed that rt2800pci is still standard, so i proceeded to install the rt2860sta driver. But with that driver i got lockups and kernel panics related to graphics so i removed it and tried out the standard rt2800pci driver instead.
And so far it's been working just fine.

So i'm not sure if the driver is finally working as it should. Anyone else noticed this now working as it should out of the box, or did you have to install the rt2860sta driver instead?

My card is a linksys wmp600n.

[Geof3010]

Hi there:

I was pretty happy to find this thread since I am having the exact same problem as you describe here.. I just installed linux mint 13 and my wireless connection is very unstable. I actually found out that this was happening only with WIFI N mode, not when I use the B/G mode.

I have the RT2800PCI module installed and I want to follow the instruction to install the one that worked for you, but when I follow the link for ralink website and after downloading the file, I cannot decompress it: the archive manager gives me this error:

An error occurred while loading the archive

Command Line Output:
bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file.
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Any idea how I can overcome this problem ??

Thanks a lot !!