Installing wireless adapter under Linux

[halfpower]

I have a device driver from the chipset manufacturer. I there a tutorial somewhere that will tell me how to install it?

 

[sourceninja]

More info? Depending on the chipset and the card, you could have a few options.

 

[n0cmonkey]

The drivers should come with information on installation.

 

[sourceninja]

Not always true with linux, sometimes the manufacture doesn't make drivers, so you have to find community made drivers. It really depends on the card. some use an ndiswrapper to use the windows drivers. The card I use has native linux drivers (but no wpa support, which is fine as I only use the wireless card for my neighboors lan anyways).

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
Not always true with linux, sometimes the manufacture doesn't make drivers, so you have to find community made drivers. It really depends on the card. some use an ndiswrapper to use the windows drivers. The card I use has native linux drivers (but no wpa support, which is fine as I only use the wireless card for my neighboors lan anyways).

but he already said he has a driver from the chipset maker, so that would mean he has drivers....he just needs help installing.

Check for docs with the download. Let us know what card you have, what distro you are using, and what (if anything) you have done.

 

[sourceninja]

Ahh I misunderstood, i thought he ment he was looking for the driver. My bad.

 

[halfpower]

The drivers should come with information on installation.

They do, but I don't understand them. I'd post the directions, but I would have to reboot twice, and write them down by hand.

 

[halfpower]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
More info? Depending on the chipset and the card, you could have a few options.

Its a Asus WL-130G WiFi@ home PCI card. It uses a RaLink RT2500 chipset.

I found some open source drivers, but I haven't been able to get them to work. I thought I might have better luck if I instead tried to use the one provided by the manufacturer.

 

[nweaver]

not sure on RaLink. Think Nothinman or n0c have used those. I've only used Atheros based cards so far.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: nweaver
not sure on RaLink. Think Nothinman or n0c have used those. I've only used Atheros based cards so far.

I have a few of them, but OpenBSD supports them out of the box.

 

[halfpower]

The directions for the driver state:

a. run 'cd STA/Module '
'cp ./2.6.x/Makefile .'
'cp ./2.6.x/load .'

There are a two things here that don't make sense to me.

1. I know of no such directory as STA/Module
2. I am instructed to copy something, but it is not clear what is supposed to be copied, and where it is to be copied to.

 

[n0cmonkey]

The sourceforge project instructions look pretty simple.

Download the file (rt2500-1.0.0.tar.gz), save it to your home directory.
Download the kernel source (whatever version you're currently using). It's probably available through your package management system. This will assume the kernel source is in /usr/src/linux.
Open a terminal.
mkdir rt2500 && cd rt2500

The tarball is a bit messy.

tar -zvxf ../rt2500-1.0.0.tar.gz
cd Module
make -C /usr/src/linux SUBDIRS=$PWD modules

Now it's made, you just have to load it.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: halfpower
The directions for the driver state:

a. run 'cd STA/Module '
'cp ./2.6.x/Makefile .'
'cp ./2.6.x/load .'

There are a two things here that don't make sense to me.

1. I know of no such directory as STA/Module
2. I am instructed to copy something, but it is not clear what is supposed to be copied, and where it is to be copied to.

1. STA is probably the directory that gets made after untarring the file you downloaded. For the OS X driver for the USB devices it's STA_2500USB.
2. It tells you what to copy. You are supposed to copy the file "Makefile" to the current working directory.