# ralink2500 asusWL-107g bsd fine but no linux

## zenlunatic

Can someone help me configure my wireless card?  Its not detected.  Its a ralink 2500 card, asus WL-107G.  Works fine in OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I'll be damned if I can't get it to work in any GNU/Linux distro I tried.  Knoppix 3.8 recongnizes the card as ra0 but freezes when I configure it for dhcp and bring it up (whole distro freezes).  The card has open source drivers and was recommended to me by the free software foundation.  Any help would be appreciated.

I tried recent version of damn small linux, damn small linux not, ubuntu breezy, ubuntu dapper beta 2, knoppix 3.8.  Like I said knoppix sees it but freezes on ifup after setting up for dhcp.  I was planning to wait to install gentoo after I get my other machine ready, but if you guys can help get this card up and running I will use gentoo because I need this computer up.

Oh I probably should say I bought this card because the FSF recommended it but its been nothing but headaches with this card and linux and the fsf refuses to help me.

Oh and feel free to contact me on jabber.

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## zenlunatic

Damn Small Linux Not also sees the card and loads the drivers (its a livecd distro).  Thing is if you try to get an ip with the card it freezes the system. DSL-N came out in May 1 and ralinks official website lists the drivers being last updated in March.  Now this site is like some guys site for the code, and that hasn't been updated since 2005, so I'm thinking the ralink drivers are officially broken.  I could be wrong though.  Does anyone else use a ralink 2500 based card successfully?  If so is it a asus WL-107G?

Can anyone recommend another card that doesn't require closed source code to use?

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## zenlunatic

I was searching the forums on that link I sent and it looks like there is some problem with smp and I will have to compile the driver myself.

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## htranou

the rt2x00 website has several drivers there. It is still actively maintained, though you'll have to get the cvs snapshots. the "legacy" drivers are based of the ones released by ralink, but they're now too different, so he can't take and merge the new released versions.

The legacy drivers aren't smp-safe but you can give a try to the rt2x00 driver which is a new codebase. It is very experimental yet. I believe there's even an ebuild in the official portage tree.

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## zenlunatic

Anyone using this driver with my card?

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## zenlunatic

I found this page here and the drivers are from 2005 and earlier.  The mailing lists on sourceforge are only for the 2400 chipset.  I guess I will browse their forums a bit more and see if I can find anything useful.

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## zenlunatic

Okay I didn't see anything on ralinks forums but now I'm going to check the open source site.

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## overkll

First off, make sure you do indeed have a rt2500 chip on your card using lspci command.

If you truly do have a rt2500 based card, you should use either rt2500-1.1.0_beta3 (stable) or rt2500-1.1.0_pre20060509 (~86, cvs version from May 9th, 2006).  Main difference between the two is that the stable version does not work with SMP, while the unstable version does work with SMP.  If you don't want to use portage, you can grab the source code from serialmonkey's website and compile it yourself.

Personally I'd steer clear of the rt2x00 driver until beta 4 comes out.  It is an attempt at unifying all the ralink drivers/chips and integrating into the kernel.

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## zenlunatic

If I can make sure it will 100% work than I will go ahead and install gentoo, but I was hoping on doing an install with distcc.  I suppose I could buy a pcmcia wired NIC.

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## zenlunatic

Okay I think the reason its detected on knoppix and DSL-N is because they use relatively recent kernels, but they have smp enabled which is why they freeze when you try to get an ip.  People have reported disabling smp and the driver works fine.

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## zenlunatic

Okay I found some howtos for multiple GNU/Linux distros that I just want to share in case anyone ever comes across my post.  I think its my obligation to do so even though they're not all gentoo related.  I have yet to try any of these things though, so I don't know if they work, but I think I'm going to test them at some later time/date.

Debian Howto for ralink2500 cards

Gentoo howto for ralink2500 cards

Ubuntu docs on ralink 2500 chipset cards

Of course you could just install OpenBSD since at least I know 3.9 supports these cards out of the box.  Linux will eventually support them out of the box, and you should continue to choose ralink cards because of their fantastic assistance to the open source community.  If you're in the UK check out this site: http://networkned.co.uk/hardware.php

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