Difference between revisions of "SuSE wireless card configuration"

Revision as of 23:37, 19 May 2008

In this article, I will demonstrate how I was able to get my wireless card working on openSuSE 10.2.

I have the following wireless card:

Linksys WMP54G 2.0 PCI Adapter
RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbux/mini-PCI (rev 01)

The fresh install of openSuSE 10.2 recognised my wireless card/adapter and configured it "properly" (i.e. it configured it as an rt2500 pci). Unfortunately, it didn't work. That is, using either Yast2 or the command line options (e.g. ifconfig, iwconfig, etc) and DHCP just didn't work.

The following commands all showed the correct module installed, but they don't seem to work:

lsmod      # check for rt2500pci (or something similar)
lspci -v   # should show the following (or something similar)
       Network controller: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI (rev 01)
       Subsystem: Linksys WMP54G 2.0 PCI Adapter
       Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 193
       Memory at d5000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
       Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2

Fortunately, there is a great website (and project) found here: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ that is dedicated to improving the wireless capabilities of these cards/adapters.

Getting it to work

• First, remove the default rt2500 driver from openSuSE 10.2:

modprobe -r rt2500pci   # as root

• Prepare your kernel source (you will need to have the kernel source installed first):

cd /usr/src/linux
make mrproper

Note: If uname -p yields i686 but no such directory exists, try a ln -s /usr/src/linux/arch/i386 i686; not sure if that is the best solution).

make cloneconfig
make modules_prepare

• Download the latest CVS-daily from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ and unzip/untar the CVS-daily. Enter the "Module" directory and execute:

make
make install   # as root

• Check that the card/adapter is configured and recognised:

iwconfig

• If the ra0 or wlan0 shows "no wireless extensions" or nothing at all, then:

modprobe rt2500

That should do it! Hope that helps someone. Not sure why openSuSE 10.2 shipped with a faulty module/driver.

Please note that you might also have to execute the following:

/etc/init.d/network restart   # as root

You might also need to temporarily turn off all firewall related software/daemons (e.g. SuSEfirewall2, AppArmor, etc).

SuSEfirewall2 stop
/etc/init.d/smpppd stop

If you have a DHCP server running, it might get in the way of your wireless network scripts.

ps -ef |grep dhcp  # If it is running, then
kill -9 PID

RutilT

If none of the above works, check out the RutilT utility for Linux that helps you configure your wireless network devices (it has extra support for Ralink ones).

Install

./configure --kernel_sources=PATH  # (e.g. /usr/src/linux)
make
make install

Run

rutilt

See also

• Network tools for Linux

External links

• The rt2x00 Open Source Project
• Wireless Network Card Installation
• RutilT
• OpenWrt — a Linux distribution for embedded devices.