I recently bought a Siemens Fujitsu Desktop PC PI 3645 and was really amazed that nearly all hardware was working out of the box with Kubuntu 8.10 64bit.

However the built-in WLAN adapter was not working. It showed up that it is a Ralink RT2870 USB Stick, somehow integrated although I haven’t found it yet.

My first try to get it working was with ndiswrapper. But I didn’t have a 64 bit Windows driver at hand, so I decided to use the original Linux driver provided by Ralink Technology.

The following posts have been of good use to me, still they have been a way too complicated or did not describe the way I got it working: “Followup on the Belkin F5D8053 and Ubuntu”, “Install linux drivers for ralink rt2870″ or “rt2870″.

UPDATE (2009/10/02): The links to the official Ralink drivers have been updated as version 2.2.0.0 of the driver package was released in Aug 2009. Still this version was not tested by me but I am happy if you leave a comment about your experiences.

Now let’s get started:

1.) First thing is to prepare the system for the driver compilation. Therefore it is needed to install certain tools and the headers of the running kernel:

• sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

2.) Now the source for the Linux driver needs to be downloaded from the Linux support page of Ralink Technology.

• Download this package (alternative mirror):
  wget http://www.ralinktech.com/license_us.php?n=2&p=0&t=U0wyRnpjMlYwY3k4eU1EQTVMekV5THpFMUwyUnZkMjVzYjJGa05UYzBNVFExTkRNNU5TNWllakk5UFQxU1ZESTROekJmVEdsdWRYaFRWRUZmVmpJdU15NHdMakF1ZEdGeUxuUmhjZz09Qw%3D%3D
• Extract it somewhere:
  tar xvfj RT2870_LinuxSTA_V2.3.0.0.tar.tar.bz2

3.) Now the support of wpa_supplicant should be enabled in the file os/linux/config.mk of the driver package.

• Open the file with your favorite text editor, for example GNU Emacs:
  emacs os/linux/config.mk
• Change the following attributes from “no (=n)”:
  

  # Support Wpa_Supplicant
HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=n

  # Support Native WpaSupplicant for Network Maganger
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=n

  … to value “yes (=y)”:

  # Support Wpa_Supplicant
HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y

  # Support Native WpaSupplicant for Network Maganger
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y

4.) Afterwards the driver needs to be build and installed. Make sure to execute both commands in the root of the driver package and with superuser privileges:

• sudo make
• sudo make install

5.) Last thing is to add this driver to /etc/modules so that it is loaded automatically every time the system is rebooted.

• Open the file with your favorite text editor, for example GNU Emacs:
  emacs /etc/modules
• Add the following line:
  rt2870sta

  (others reported that they had only success by adding “alias ra0 rt2870sta“)

6.) If you do not want to reboot your machine, you should execute the following two lines with superuser privileges to load the driver and to integrate it in your networking configuration:

• sudo modprobe rt2870sta
• sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Now in my case with Kubuntu the KNetworkManager came up and listed me all available WLAN networks. Even without wpa_supplicant I was able to connect to my WPA2 encrypted network as KNetworkManager seems to have build-in WPA2 support.