[gNewSense-users] Progress trying to get working wireless card

[Guy Johnston]

Well I seem to have made some progress on getting a wireless card which
works well with gNewSense. I've bought a Linksys WUSB54G version 4,
which I managed to find on eBay. According to the list at
http://ralink.rapla.net/, as well as the list on the FSF taken from
there, it uses the RT2500 chipset, so it should work well. It's also one
of the two which have specificially been tested by the FSF and found to
work well.

So far, I've managed to get it working well with an unsecured network,
out of the box with gNewSense and Kubuntu Edgy. Strangely, it seems to
use the RT2570 driver, as that's the module that's loaded, even though
it definitely identifies itself as 'RT2500USB WLAN' when you run
iwconfig in the command line, so I assume it must be using the right
chipset. I don't know if the RT2570 is another chipset, or if that's a
different driver specifically for the USB cards which use the RT2500
chipset.

However, I need to get WPA working, which I haven't managed to do yet.
WPA seems to be quite difficult with GNU/Linux at the moment, and it
isn't supported by the standard configuration in GNOME or KDE. That's
not too surprising as it's a relatively very new technology, as wireless
networking generally is, and it doesn't even work hugely well on Windows
yet, despite the much larger support it has from manufacturers and
software developers. I've got it working before with the not-very-good,
proprietary-firmware-needing driver for my ZD1211B-based card using
KNetWorkManager, but that doesn't seem to be working for the new card at
the moment. I've found a HOWTO for RT2500 chipsets on the Ubuntu forums
which I'm trying to follow, but that hasn't worked yet either. One thing
that's particularly strange is that the device for the new card is
called 'rausb0' on my computer, rather than 'ra0', which seems to be
more common in the HOWTOs. Anyway, hopefully I'll manage to get that
working soon. If I do, I can confirm whether or not I think this card is
a good choice for gNewSense users.

On a different note, this list seems to be quite quiet at the moment. I
assume that's because of the new forum. I think I prefer mailing lists,
except for points which are completely off topic, because it's easier to
keep track of discussions.

Guy