It’s all in a day’s work

Update: I got it working now, see my new post about it.

If I look at the Windows driver for my new Belkin F5D8053 it is based on the RT2870 chipset. There is a native driver available for this chipset. Unfortunately so far I’m not able to get it to work. This version is already linux 2.6.24 ready so I don’t need to apply these patches. But even though I’m able to compile it, I’m not able to use it, yet. Side note: the warning in the Ubuntu forums about backing up any existing configurations in /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA is useful, since you need to put your configuration in there and it’s removed by the make install.

One strange thing in the make process is that it wants to copy the result to /tftpboot. I’m not sure why it wants to do that, and I’m almost certain it shouldn’t be a part of the make process…

The first problem I ran into was the fact that the USB Device id for my Belkin, 050D:815C, is missing in the driver (that could be a big hint about it not being able to work for it …) so I added that to the include/rt2870.h (I copied the line for the other Belkin device and changed the device id into mine).

With that added, my Belkin is detected by the driver as ra0. But even when I compile it with:

HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y


I’m not getting my device visible in the gnome network manager, so I tried the command line configuration options.

First I tried only configuring the /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/RT2870STA.dat. But if I had only that file configured, the activity light was turned off on an ifup ra0. So I guess that’s not right.

Then I tried to configure it in the /etc/network/interfaces as described on the Ubuntu forums. The light staid on when I did ifup ra0 but no DHCP lease. So finally I tried the “iwpriv” way described here. But still no DHCP lease.

So I guess I’ll have to contact ralink, to see if they are able to help me out here.