Comments on: HowTo: WLAN Ralink RT2870 USB Stick + (K)Ubuntu 8.10

By: Marcel

Marcel — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:31:05 +0000

Thanks a lot. I got my Belkin F5D8053 running under Dreamlinux 3.5 by following your tutorial.

By: Nan M

Nan M — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:29:49 +0000

I’m in your debt Mr Schmuhl. I can’t find your Flattr button to thank you for being the (nearly) only web site that links to the alternative Ralink download location for this elusive driver.
Ralkink’s site seems to be permanently down.

For your data:
Device “NetComm 11n Wireless” usb
The driver compiled perfectly using Karmic Gnome. I look forward to testing the compile again when I try out Natty next month.
The device loads automatically with the kernel driver “rt2800usb” added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.
And thanks for the tip about toggling Wpa Supplicant mode on!

It talks at 135Mbs to our new Fritz!BoxFon 7270. AVM have just released their beautiful technology on the Australian market and I’m simply amazed at the cleverness of this home network manager.
And the DECT Fritzfon isn’t too bad either

PS love the boots/girl/woman pics. Ha!

regards, Nan M

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:59:58 +0000

I have a USB wireless-n adapter on Ubuntu 10.04. I installed WICD instead of the default Gnome Network Manager. I can see my network as plain as day but when I enter either the WPA 1/2 password and / or the preshared network key for my D-Link DIR-628, I get an incorrect password message in WICD. Am I missing something?

By: demo

demo — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:07:42 +0000

hmm.. looks promising. in <=9.04 my wifi dongle (belkin N) worked flawlessly, ever since 9.10 i had to blacklist rt2800sta, but since the release of 10.04 (amongst slackware/sidux/debian/fedora/mint/sabayon…) i cannot seem to get it working (i think i've typed `modprobe` more times than i have "lol" now..) Must be a mainstream kernel problem? Literally installed/formatted over 50 different distros trying to find one that will work *out of the box*. No luck… writing from a windows xp box rofl.

Anyway thanks for post it looks like it may finally work. I'll post back with my dongles hardware id and any other things i had to do if it works.

By: Masclatpete

Masclatpete — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:56:04 +0000

Your tutorial worked like a dream on Linux Mint 9 (32 bit) and a realcheap usb wifi dongle (RT2870 chipset)from Hong Kong. I’m truly indebted to you – Thank you.

By: Graham

Graham — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:53:01 +0000

Sorted out my problems with the RT2870 (Edimax 7711Uan) on Ubuntu 10.04 – Sir, you are a star

By: Joel

Joel — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 05:08:12 +0000

I have wusb100v2 working with ubuntu 10 beta, and I have the most everything complete except I can not get the device to transmit, or work. I have ra0 listed as my network device, and I can bring it up and down, but I can not set the power level or transmit power. It gives me operation not supported 8b26

By: Bruce Driver

Bruce Driver — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:49:21 +0000

Thank you for your detailed step-by-step instructions for obtaining, compiling, and installing the Linux driver for

the RT2870 USB device for Ubuntu 8.10.

My USB device is at least now seen by the OS. lshw -C network and iwconfig now show the following for me.

lshw -C network
…
*-network:0
description: Wireless interface
physical id: 1
logical name: ra0
serial: 00:25:9c:e7:62:35
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=RALINK WLAN driverversion=2.3.0.0 multicast=yes wireless=Ralink STA
…

root@ubuntu0:/etc/network# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

ra0 Ralink STA ESSID:”11n-AP” Nickname:”RT2870STA”
Mode:Auto Frequency=2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:1 Mb/s
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Link Quality=10/100 Signal level:0 dBm Noise level:-87 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

vnet0 no wireless extensions.

pan0 no wireless extensions.

But I still have not had any success in actually establishing network connectivity. I have attempted to setup
the network

1) manually, e.g.,

iwconfig ra0 mode Managed
iwconfig ra0 essid GXBL1

and 2) using Network Manager

but have had no success. Could you give me some direction? I would be happy to supply any additional
information that you might need.

Thanks,
Bruce Driver

By: nn

nn — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:27:59 +0000

While compiling the driver I get an error with Karmic about net_device. I remember googling something like this before: ‘linux kernel 2.6.31 removes support for old net_device api’.
The driver doesn’t work with kernel 2.6.31 & above?

By: Dennis Gearon

Dennis Gearon — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:21:55 +0000

There seems to be no links available to download the driver files at RALink EXCEPT the one that you provide above. They seem to be dropping it.

http://www.ralinktech.com/download.php?t=U0wyRnpjMlYwY3k4eU1EQTVMekE0THpJMEwyUnZkMjVzYjJGa01ERTFPVGs0TmpRMk1DNWllakk5UFQweU1EQTVYekE0TWpCZlVsUXlPRGN3WDB4cGJuVjRYMU5VUVY5V01pNHlMakF1TUM1MFlYST1D