RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI

[gareth41]

i have a:

RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI

that is what shows up from lspci.

i cant get the internet to work, in the networking dialog i have wmaster0 and wlan0, it says these are both enabled (i endabled them) after searching the forums it seems i have to get the latest drivers for the card, and compile them etc, or maybe i have to not use network settings (im on xubuntu), or maybe something else, is there not a simple way to get the internet using this card, i got it because i thought there would be.

i am using xubuntu 6.10

[K.Mandla]

I used to have a Linksys WMP54G v4.1 which had an RT61 chipset. I don't know if you have an Nvidia video card or not, but this is the way it worked for me. If you don't have an Nvidia card, you probably won't need to work so hard at it.

Search around the forums, too. There is a howto or two about RT61 cards that might help.

[tictacman]

I have managed to get an edimax card which has rt61 chip working with xubuntu. Most frustrating for me is that 6.10 shipped with a bad driver. I followed this guide and it managed to get it working.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=296822

I did have some difficulty following the guide to get wpa encryption working though. Instead I used another guide:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=263136.

Good luck

[gareth41]

ok, i tried installing ubuntu 6.10 over xubuntu, this gave me the ra0 in the network manager, so i activated it - this had a progress bar that took ~3 minutes to complete. Now when i boot into ubuntu it hangs on configuring the network, what is it doing that is taking so long? Is there no timeout? how can i fix it?

the card works fine in windows.

[tictacman]

Are you running wpa on your card?

For me xubuntu loads up quickly, but I did have some problems getting wpa_supplicant to work. I had to manually bring the card down and then restart it once I logged in, in order to get it to work. In the end I created a simple script with a delay to do this for me automatically on boot, and its been running great ever since.

[gareth41]

there is no security on my router, apart from mac filtering. I cant boot into ubuntu at all tho...

[raymac46]

I had a similar situation with an RT73 setup and had to blacklist some competing drivers before I could install the right one. Check this out.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...cs%2FDevice%29

[tictacman]

Must be something to do with the way the card is setup if there's no security. I'm sure if you post the output from ifconfig and /etc/network/interfaces someone will be able to spot what's going on.

I thought it might be useful if I posted my working configuration as a comparison. Here it is:

/etc/network/interfaces:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto ra0
iface ra0 inet dhcp
essid NETWORKNAME

(I don't need wired connection so there's no eth0)

ifconfig:


sudo ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:13:8F:0F:E0:3D
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:201 Base address:0xd400

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:2660 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2660 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:333099 (325.2 KiB) TX bytes:333099 (325.2 KiB)

ra0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0E:2E:9D:62:C7
inet addr:192.168.1.104 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:691050 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:296026 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:6939 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:799996408 (762.9 MiB) TX bytes:27228209 (25.9 MiB)
Interrupt:193

[whayong]

Here's my post from last night taken from this thread:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...&highlight=wpa

That actually didn't work, but guess who's posting this wirelessly? Woooohoooooo! Here's what I did: I followed this how to: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...cs%2FDriver%29 which to my knowledge is the same as this how to. When i got to the part of blacklisting, I had some problems so I used nautilus and went to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and addedd "blacklist rt61pci" (without the quotation marks) to the last line and followed the rest of the how to. For the record, my wireless card is a MSI MP54G5 mPCI card. lspci lists it as RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g. This is on a Vaio PCG-SRX77 laptop 20 GB HD 384 MB RAM. Ubuntu 6.10 I hope this info will be usefull to others just as this how to was usefull to me. It only took me 1 month and 6 fresh installs to get the wireless working. lol! Thanks to the great people on this forum and to the OP for the help.

Hope that helps. I know it sucks when people point you to other threads, but really, the info is there, and the patience is KEY!

[gareth41]

thanks for suggesting those idea, but as i said, i cant boot into ubuntu (i also tried recovery mode), it just hangs on "configuring hardware interfaces..." or "loading hardware drivers...", what can i do?