Finally I got the rt2860 driver working with draft-n and dual band. The original kernel module coming through firmware-ralink in debian sid is ralink 2.2.0.0 (rather current than ubuntu which ships 1.8.0.0) but it has debugging output enabled which throws a message every second into the syslog. Furthermore the driver only supports 54 MBit/s out-of-the-box. But why bying drat-n and dualb band then? Yep right, I needed to search for other solutions.
One of them was to just create /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat with the file from the ralink rt2860 source. Well, tried that but the debianized staging driver did not recognize it. The things mentioned in debian wiki to just set desired rate values through iwconfig also did not work – iwconfig from wireless-tools simply does not have the privileges adding ioctl to the driver.
But iwlist wlan0 scan always showed that there is my draft-n dual band wlan router available. So, another solution was needed. Reading the ubuntu wiki just collects on what to do when installing the driver source from ralink against the actual kernel. The only problem stays there – after booting into a new kernel the wireless driver module needs to be compiled and installed too.
But in fact it’s the most suitable solution right now, because no more syslog debug spam and more wireless rates 🙂
Here we go:
Download the actual source for rt2860 – 2.3.0.0 currently. Copy the tar.bz to /usr/src and then
$ tar xvjf 2010_01_29_RT2860_Linux_STA_v2.3.0.0.tar.bz2 $ cd 2010_01_29_RT2860_Linux_STA_v2.3.0.0 $ vim os/linux/config.mk
Change the 2 wpa supplicant entries to ‘y’
$ sudo make $ sudo make install
This will install the kernel module and also the RT2860STA.dat with the right settings.
Next step – wlan0 changes into ra0, so fire up vim again.
$ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
Then reboot the system. ra0 will go up and now has full speed enabled – the debug stuff remains, but this comes through the firmware then.
Check the speed with
$ sudo iwconfig ar0 $ sudo iwlist ar0 scan
And just to remember the steps after booting into a new kernel:
Linux phoenix 2.6.33-2.slh.5-sidux-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Apr 10 23:29:25 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux ifdown ra0; cd /usr/src/2010_01_29_RT2860_Linux_STA_v2.3.0.0; make; make install; ifup ra0