Friday, May 07, 2010

Followup on Ubuntu, Wireless, and WPA #2

Thanks to a comment to this blog made by knnniggett, there appears yet another way to deal with the RT2860 driver issue. This may turn out to be the definitive solution.

The problem with upgrading to the unreleased kernel 2.6.33 is that it is unreleased. In the case of my RT2860 card it limits the speed to "G" 54 mbs speeds, and at least on my machine I could no longer suspend or hibernate properly.

Apparently, there exists a package that installs backported drivers so that they will work on the current kernel. I just did this and I am happy to report it seems to work and I am running at "N" speeds. I'll have to test suspend after I make this post!

What I did was uninstall the 2.6.33 test kernel so I would revert back to 2.6.32. I then attempted to install the backport package that knnniggett suggests. He suggested this command line:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic

I found this didn't work for me, but a slight modification to reflect that with 10.04 we are running "Lucid" not "Karmic". So I modified the line to:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic 

And behold it works! You may find you need to change the setting in the Synaptic Package Manager under the Software Sources - Updates Tab and check mark the Unsupported updates (lucid-backports) and then reload the repositories. You could probably also do this from the command line with an apt-get update type of command.

So thanks to knnniggett for the great suggestion.

3 comments:

Walt O'Dowd said...

Thanks for the heads-up on this one. Still not sure what was going on but I ran the line of code and all now working sweet with my wifi connection.
See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9258021#post9258021

Anonymous said...

Hmm,

Is it necessary to upgrade to 2.6.33 kernel first and then revert? I skipped that part and only installed the backported wireless package, but that didn't work for me.

Regards,
Marcel Loose.

Zack said...

Hi,

I did the same thing. basically installed the linux backports and it didnt work for me either. ... any help would be great. thanks for the great blog n the instructions so far :)