In order to test the theory, I installed WICD instead, as I have in the past, and once again WICD fixed the problem. I’m not sure why the WICD team just seem to be able to get wireless to work where Network Manager boys persistently struggle, and WICD lacks the additional functionality of 3G connection management, but it just bloody works and that’s the most important feature of a connection manager.

I’ve been using WICD on and off for some time, and I’m impressed with the speed it has developed. It also looks a lot slicker than it did in the early days, something that has not gone unnoticed in the Ubuntu camp as it’s now available in the repositories. One command,

sudo apt-get install wicd

now ditches Network Manager and installs WICD. If you’re having problems with the AR5008 in Ubuntu, it’s well worth a try.

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.)