Arch Linux

smitty

Member

Registered: 2008-01-17

Posts: 73

[solved] will Belkin F5D8053 wireless work with the newest kernel?

It's been a long time since I've back in Arch. I always liked Arch, but have tried other distros just for fun. I recently tried Sabayon 5.1, but it didn't support with even the built in ndiswrapper command. I know it worked in Archlinux 2007 out of the box. I don't understand why it wouldn't work in Sabayon, unless it's a Sabayon kernel vs Archlinux kernel issue. I will make Arch my permanent home if I can get it to work, or just buy a more linux supported wireless device, perhaps. I just want to know if the Belkin device works in the newer kernel for Arch. Or, did they take things out in the newer kernel for Belkin wireless devices like these? TIA.
...
Update:
rt2870sta was the one that end up working for me. However, I think I gave it a boost when I did:

ifconfig wlan0 up

Every time I did that, I noticed a "1" in the lsmod section, at least for the rt2870sta module I tried it on. I also liked how it started showing up in Gnome's "Wireless Task Panel"(i.e. the progress bar like icon on the system tray). After that, I just connected to my wireless router and it worked. Now, the question is, how do I keep it automatically connect in Gnome (I'm sure is a Gnome question!). Thanks for all the advice!

Last edited by smitty (2010-03-31 00:15:31)

andrewd18

Member

From: Wisconsin, USA

Registered: 2007-08-02

Posts: 34

Re: [solved] will Belkin F5D8053 wireless work with the newest kernel?

What chipset is it running? Can you plug it in and post the output of "lsusb"? Which kernel are you planning on running, standard Arch kernel, a vanilla kernel off kernel.org, or a self-compiled, patched kernel?

smitty

Member

Registered: 2008-01-17

Posts: 73

Re: [solved] will Belkin F5D8053 wireless work with the newest kernel?

I am running the x86_64 (aka 64-bit chipset) edition of Arch. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to write out everything in lsusb, but I see it does detect the Belkin Wireless that I have. However, lsmod is very confusing on what it saw. It showed this first after I installed the driver with ndiswrapper:

rt2870sta 1
rt2800usb 1
rt2x00usb 1 (used by (rt2800usb)
rt2x00lib 1 (used by rt2800usb)

this was done through:

ndiswrapper -l

Then, I disabled the other modules, leaving the rt2870sta module in memory. My rc.conf:

MODULES=!rt2800usb !rt2x00usb !rtx00lib
...
ra0="dhcp"
wlan0="dhcp"
INTERFACE="ra0 wlan0"

gateway = "default gw 192.168.0.1"
ROUTES = (!gateway)
...
DAEMONS = syslog-ng dbus hal network openntpd netfs crond alsa gdm

The reason I have ra0 in my INTERACE in rc.conf is that when I was in Sabayon, it detected it as ra0, when I did iwconfig. The Wiki doesn't have an extensive tutorial on how to get this working, because I know it worked in Sabayon 5.1 , and before in Archlinux 2007. I believe they add new more interfaces in the newer Arch, if I'm not mistaken.  When I blacklist just rt2800usb and leave the others (i.e. rt2800usb, rtx00usb, and rt2x00lib) in, it still doesn't work, but rt2870sta shows up as a "0" that way. When I blacklist all three, it gives me:

rt2870sta 0

and none of the others show up in lsmod. I know I'm not doing something correctly somewhere. Any ideas?

smitty

Member

Registered: 2008-01-17

Posts: 73

Re: [solved] will Belkin F5D8053 wireless work with the newest kernel?

I meant to mention that the wireless device shows up somewhat (i.e. not with all information) in wlan0 when I do a iwconfig in all cases.

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: [solved] will Belkin F5D8053 wireless work with the newest kernel?

Firstly, forget about ndiswrapper. Remove it from your system. It did not load any of the modules listed in lsmod. You have a choice of two in-kernel drivers, so you don't need any windows stuff.

Boot your machine without the device attached, then plug it in and check what modules, if any, are loaded. If you get both rt2800usb and rt2870sta, your preference ideally should be for the 2800 driver, as the 2870 is still in the kernel's staging area. In practice, however, you should choose the one that works best.

rt2800usb depends on rt2800lib ad rt2x00usb - rt2870sta does not.

You should use only one at a time, which means you should blacklist the one you don't want. For more details about how to configure the drivers, have a look at the Wireless Setup page in the wiki.

schuay

Package Maintainer (PM)

From: Austria

Registered: 2008-08-19

Posts: 564

Re: [solved] will Belkin F5D8053 wireless work with the newest kernel?

Yep it works.

lsusb | grep 80
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 050d:815c Belkin Components Ralink RT2870 [F5D8053 N Wireless USB Adapter v3000]

ifconfig wlan0
wlan0     [...]
          RX bytes:147950140 (141.0 Mb)  TX bytes:6917362 (6.5 Mb)

lsmod | grep rt2
rt2870sta             441560  1 
usbcore               144668  5 rt2870sta,usbhid,uhci_hcd,ehci_hcd

Last edited by schuay (2010-03-30 15:05:56)