RT61 WPA Wireless help (solved)

[dahranis]

Can somebody please explain to me how I can connect my RT61 wireless card to my router using WPA?
I can connect through Ubuntu via dhclient when WPA is switched off, but cannot under Gentoo.

I would like to use WPA however I read that RT61 isn't compatible with WPA_supplicant?
Can somebody please explain how I would do this?

[micmac]

Hi there,

first you need to choose a driver. There are multiple drivers one can try:

1. The official Linux driver from Ralink available at their website
2. The "legacy" rt61 driver based on the original driver from Ralink is maintained by the rt2400 Project
3. A complete rewrite called rt2x00 also at rt2400 Project
4. ndiswrapper

Mind you that the official and the "legacy" driver don't rely on wpa_supplicant for WPA support.
Instead they rely on iwpriv commands or module parameters. The latter drivers do support
wpa_supplicant.

I tried all of them at times and the first three all sucked one way or the other. Encryption with them
was even worse. For the time being I use ndiswrapper. It just works given you find a compatible
Windows driver. I have a Conceptronic card running with vendor supplied drivers, ndiswrapper (v1.47),
wpa_supplicant (-Dwext) and dhcpcd.

After setting up the driver you can use this guide to configure the device:
Gentoo Wireless Networking

Hope this helps!
micmac

[Aysen]

I have a rt61 based wifi card and all I've done is:

• downloaded a CVS snapshot of "Enhanced legacy drivers - rt61 (PCI/PCMCIA)" from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php?title=Downloads,
• compileed and installed the Module/ subdirectory from the snapshot (the only files it installs is the kernel module and 3 firmware files),
• verified it works (all the instructions are in the README file),
• added the following to my /etc/conf.d/net:

  Code:

  mode_wlan0="managed" channel_wlan0="11" essid_wlan0="MYESSID" iwpriv_MYESSID=(         "set AuthMode=WPA2PSK"         "set EncrypType=AES"         "set WPAPSK=MYPASSWORD" ) config_wlan0=("dhcp")

  (substitule MYESSID and MYPASSWORD with your own vlaues, of course). More examples are in /etc/conf.d/net.example and /etc/conf.d/wireless files.

It works perfectly, no problems so far. It doesn't use wpa_supplicant - that's why you put all the stuff into /etc/conf.d/net.
I'm looking forward to kernel 2.6.24, though - the rt2x00 driver (the new fancy one, not the legacy ones) will be integrated in it. It will support wpa_supplicant and use the new wireless stack from recent kernels. I've tried using that new driver with my current kernel, but failed compiling it :-/

HTH

[dahranis]

Should really edit this post to 'solved'
I managed to get it working, I unmasked the net-wireless/rt61 package in portage, and vimed the conf.d/net.
Thanks anyway

[Aysen]

Oh well.. I'm glad you solved it. BTW, I've also tried emerging net-wireless/rt61, but it didn't compile. That's why I fetched the CVS snapshot.