RT73 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex
If you’ve used the Ralink RT73 chipset under Ubuntu for any length of time, you’ll know that the default drivers aren’t yet perfect (some supporting evidence). Some may have had more success, but in my experience they drop out regularly and transfer rates are pretty mediocre. The modules used are the rt2x00usb and rt73usb. These are the next generation of Ralink drivers from Serialmonkey, and to be fair they have improved a great deal over the past couple of years. However, there is a more stable driver, which, although requiring some sacrifice, rewards the user with good injection support, great transfer speeds and no drop-outs.
Step forward the rt73 legacy driver….
This “legacy” driver is still supported by Serialmonkey, as I myself witnessed when I found the module no longer compiled on Intrepid’s kernel. Vern, one of the developers, fixed the issue and the module now compiles without complaints. I was approached on the forum by someone wanting to know how to go about using this older module so I thought I’d write a quick how to. There is one already on the ubuntu forums, but it is a little dated and doesn’t include details about WICD.
First the bad news. The legacy driver doesn’t work with network-manager. This is more of a shame now network manager has actually started to justify its extra cpu usage, with decent support for mobile network connections, but there are ways to configure and use those without it.
The howto:
First download the tar.gz file for the rt73 driver (you can find it on the downloads page of the rt2x00 site).
Next download WICD. There is a .deb available. I can’t get version 1.5.3 to work, but others have not had problems. There’s probably a .deb of version 1.4.x floating around the net, if not I have one somewhere (update: here). I personally have to alter the file /opt/wicd/networking.py in version 1.4.2 to get it to work (I comment out line 365 which puts the interface down), but again no-one else seems to suffer with this glitch. You can add wicd to your sources list – I don’t just in case I lose connection and can’t download it when network-manager is removed:
sudo apt-get remove network-manager network-manager-gnome
Next you need to blacklist the existing ralink drivers that Intrepid uses. Edit the file:
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
and add these lines:
#Ralink, we're using the legacy driver now
blacklist rt73usb
blacklist rt2x00usb
blacklist rt2500usb
blacklist rt2x00lib
then remove the modules as they’ll currently be loaded into the kernel:
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
(I’m guessing your wireless interface is wlan0 – you need to put it down first or the kernel won’t let you unload the module. You can find out for sure what it is called using ifconfig -a)
sudo modprobe -r rt73usb
sudo modprobe -r rt2500usb
sudo modprobe -r rt2x00usb
Okay now we can compile the module. cd to the directory containing the driver you downloaded. Then:
tar -xvzf rt73-cvs-daily.tar.gz
cd rt73-cvs-THE_TIMESTAMP/Module/
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe -v rt73
..where THE_TIMESTAMP is the date part of the extracted directory. Then:
ifconfig -a
to find out the name of the interface (probably wlan0)
install and open up WICD and open the preferences. Select “ralink legacy” and type in the interface name in the “wireless interface” box.
Then you should be able to “refresh” and see your network. Add the encryption key if needed and connect.
Remember if it all goes wrong you’ll need to reinstall network manager (try rebooting first!)
sudo apt-get install network-manager network-manager-gnome
and comment out the lines you added to /etc/modprobe/blacklist (In fact if you’ve successfully loaded the rt73 driver you’ll need to blacklist that instead of the others: blacklist rt73 – in order for it not to conflict with the default Intrepid modules.)
In: Linux · Tagged with: ibex, intrepid, Linux, ralink, rt73, ubuntu, WICD
on 03/11/2008 at 7:53 pm
Permalink
hello, wicd is not working well, but rutilt goes fine, I can connect to wifi, but when I tried with wicd the networks disappear. Now i want to now if i can use the network manager of ubuntu to use de wired net. Thanks for your help.
on 03/11/2008 at 8:32 pm
Permalink
Hi Josemar, have you tried the version of WICD linked above (Version 1.4.2-1) ? You’ll need to tell WICD what your wireless interface is called in the preferences tab (it’s probably wlan0).
The legacy RT73 module is not compatible with Network-Manager in Ubuntu so you either have to use WICD, Rutilt or edit /etc/network/interfaces and enter the details of your network manually.
on 04/11/2008 at 7:05 pm
Permalink
Version wicd 1.4.2-1 works fine, I didn’t test with wired network, but wifi goes well, thanks to you, again, I hope the new version of wicd works well.
See you.
on 17/11/2008 at 2:14 pm
Permalink
Hi, I did everything as you told. I do see the wireless networks here, I just can’t connect to my own network which is secured with WPA-PSK. He tries to get an IP from it but doesn’t succeed. I already entered the encryption key in the settings of the network :/ do you know a solution to this?
on 17/11/2008 at 8:52 pm
Permalink
Hi Christian, are you using WICD version 1.4.2? If so, have you tried commenting out (placing a # at the start of the line) line 365 of /opt/wicd/networking.py?
The line reads:
misc.Run(“ifconfig ” + self.wireless_interface + ” down”)
and I change it to:
# misc.Run(“ifconfig ” + self.wireless_interface + ” down”)
on 18/11/2008 at 4:42 pm
Permalink
Oh yes thank you
! That did the trick! Though since I installed the drivers the bootup time of my ubuntu slowed down which I think is a problem experienced by some others, too. I still did not find a solution though. But anyways, this is the first step-by-step tutorial that works for me.
on 13/12/2008 at 5:02 pm
Permalink
Is anyone here experiencing constant connection losses and delayed packets? I have tried this method and that problem persists. Could be there is some incompatibility between this legacy driver and my WPA2-PSK AES authentication scheme? because this never happens in windows!
Thanks!
on 24/12/2008 at 1:13 pm
Permalink
Worked for me!
Thank you very much indeed! This is the first tutorial that works for me!
Thanks!
on 03/02/2009 at 12:20 am
Permalink
Hi, i can’t understand why you use the WiCD app when exists an especific network manager for the Ralink Chipsets like Rutilt.
See you.
on 05/02/2009 at 9:42 am
Permalink
Because I tried RuTilt and didn’t get along with it. I’d be more than happy to add a section on RuTilt but I can no longer test it – I’ve changed my wireless chip now to an Atheros so I have 802.11n support.
on 05/05/2009 at 6:49 am
Permalink
Long time, my friend, XDD.
I can’t see in serialmonkey the legacy driver, what happen??
If you have the driver, pliss try to upload to a server, I need for ubuntu 9.04
Thanks!!!
on 05/05/2009 at 7:11 am
Permalink
Hello! I’m not sure what happened to the driver, but the rt2x00 tree is now available in Wireless Kernel, you may have some luck with that + Network Manager.
on 05/05/2009 at 9:14 pm
Permalink
I hope the driver works to put in monitor mode, Thanks!!
on 05/08/2009 at 5:33 pm
Permalink
Dear mcmlxxii,
These instructions worked like charm. Although I had to download wicd 1.4.2 from sourceforge [The link you provided is not valid], I am very happy about this post
Thanks a ton
on 05/08/2009 at 6:12 pm
Permalink
[...] Essential Info is available here : MCMLXXII [...]