In case you are planning to buy wireless PCI/USB

Paul Mora paulmora-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sat Dec 24 01:49:57 UTC 2005


On 12/23/05, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 04:02:24PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 03:44:40PM -0500, William Park wrote:
> > > I just joined the wireless revolution, and I'm not impressed.
> > > I bought
> > >     - Airlink AWLH3026 PCI -- Ralink 2561 chip
> >
> > Well that one should work with linux from what I have read.
>
> That's what I thought when I bought it.  All the articles said 2500
> chipset, but they were in fact referring to Ralink 2560 chip.  Ralink
> 2561 is proprietary binary only.
>

Earlier in the year, I bought an ASUS WiFi-G card from Tiger Direct for
around $30.  At the time, I didn't know whether it worked under Linux, but
for that price for a G card, I figured it was worth a try.  I really wanted
this card for my PVR.

The card uses a RALINK RT2560F chipset.  I went to their website, and was
pleasantly surprised to find some Linux drivers for it.  The first ones I
tried were the binary only ones, and they didn't work at all.  The next ones
I tried were the open source drivers (I had heard Ralink GPL'd their driver
code for these cards).  I can not, for the life of me, get the drivers to
compile.  The README file that comes with them is pretty much illegible.

Some distros include these drivers, but I could not find anything that was
pre-built for Fedora Core 3.  I ended up getting the card working using
ndiswrapper, but it was hit and miss, and depended on a particular kernel
option (16K stack) which is not default in the Fedora kernels.

I gave up eventually, and just used a wired card (and snake the wire up the
stairs, much to the chagrin of my wife).  I've still got the card, and will
give it another go when I have time.  It works perfectly fine under that
_other_ OS... :-(

My $0.02 about Ralink.

pm

--
Paul Mora
email: paulmora-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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