Can Suse only handle one usb wi-fi device installed?

English Network/Internet
#1

I have a usb wi-fi 802.11n device that I can’t get working on my machine running Suse 11 64 bit

On my wife’s machine running Suse 11 32 bit, Yast picked the device up a treat, had it installed and woring in no time on hers

On my machine, the 64 bit, lsusb shows this for the device:

lsusb

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 148f:2770 Ralink Technology, Corp.

iwconfig doesn’t show the device as present, so I thought I’d try ndiswrapper and the windows driver, ndiswrapper reports an error on installing the driver (I’d tried installing it via ndisinstaller)

But ndiswrapper -l shows this:

ndiswrapper -l

rt2870 : driver installed
device (148F:2770) present

iwconfig still doesn’t show the device

dmesg reports the device without any errors

If I run kndiswrapper, the device is listed but if I click the Configure Network button it says no interface is present … even though it’s showing the correct name of the device completely with pretty little picture

I do have an 802.11g device installed on the 64 bit machine, though it’s configured to run on hotplug and is unplugged when I’m trying to configure the 802.11n

This is the 802.11g device:

lsusb
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501USB Wireless Adapter

This leaves me thinking that either the 64 bit Suse doesn’t like the particular device, or it doesn’t like the fact I already have a usb wi-fi device configured

Any ideas?

#2

Ecky wrote:

> This leaves me thinking that either the 64 bit Suse doesn’t like the
> particular device, or it doesn’t like the fact I already have a usb
> wi-fi device configured

The connection is actually for the AP and works for any number of wifi devices
as long as you connect only one at a time.

Larry

#3

I didn’t think it should make a difference

But what should happen ain’t always what really happens I’ve found

Has to be either that or the fact it’s using the 64 bit OS, can’t see any other reason

#4

If you are using 64-bit suse, you need to make certain that you are using the 64-bit windows driver with ndiswrapper. If both drivers are in the same directory, ndiswrapper will grab the 32-bit version.

#5

There’s only one driver

No seperate 64 bit driver, therein probably lies the problem

#6

Ecky wrote:
> There’s only one driver
>
> No seperate 64 bit driver, therein probably lies the problem

Yes. Only 64-bit Windows drivers can be used with ndiswrapper on a 64-bit system.

#7

According to one forum I came across while searching for 64 bit ralink drivers, ndiswrapper doesn’t support 64 bit vista drivers either

I have managed to find one for the 2770/2870 chipset that claims to be supported on 64 bit xp/2003 server/vista and it’s downloading as we speak … damned slow server it’s coming from though

Out of time for playing with things today so I’ll give that a shot tomorrow

#8

The only windows 64 bit driver I’ve been able to find for it is an exe that doesn’t appear to generate any inf files

Haven’t been able to find any linux 64 bit driver for it

Guess I go shopping for another adapter that does support 64 bit

#9

Great fun this …

A search for rt2870 64 bit found this page with a linux driver:

Ralink RT2870 drivers

Worth trying it I thought, the instructions in the readme are not for the faint-hearted!

Got it to run make after playing around with edits to makefile and another file called config.mk as per the readme, and got this warning, no errors that I could see

Building modules, stage 2.
MODPOST 1 modules
WARNING: /home/rune/2008_0528_RT2870_Linux_STA_v1.3.0.0/os/linux/rt2870sta.o(.text+0x41b20): Section mismatch in reference from the function rtusb_probe() to the function .devinit.text:rt28xx_probe()
The function rtusb_probe() references
the function __devinit rt28xx_probe().
This is often because rtusb_probe lacks a __devinit
annotation or the annotation of rt28xx_probe is wrong.

I’m not really sure whether that means something went wrong or not, so I followed the next bit which says:

[kernel 2.6]
# $/sbin/insmod rt2870sta.ko
# $/sbin/ifconfig ra0 inet YOUR_IP up

and got this:

/sbin/insmod rt2870sta.o

insmod: error inserting ‘rt2870sta.o’: -1 Invalid module format

That one obviously means something is wrong, but I have no idea what … maybe the driver really isn’t 64 bit as claimed

Any ideas?

#10

Ecky wrote:
> Great fun this …
>
> A search for rt2870 64 bit found this page with a linux driver:
>
> ‘Ralink RT2870 drivers’
> (http://driverscollection.com/?H=RT2870&By=Ralink)
>
> Worth trying it I thought, the instructions in the readme are not for
> the faint-hearted!
>
> Got it to run make after playing around with edits to makefile and
> another file called config.mk as per the readme, and got this warning,
> no errors that I could see
>
> Building modules, stage 2.
> MODPOST 1 modules
> WARNING:
> /home/rune/2008_0528_RT2870_Linux_STA_v1.3.0.0/os/linux/rt2870sta.o(.text+0x41b20):
> Section mismatch in reference from the function rtusb_probe() to the
> function .devinit.text:rt28xx_probe()
> The function rtusb_probe() references
> the function __devinit rt28xx_probe().
> This is often because rtusb_probe lacks a __devinit
> annotation or the annotation of rt28xx_probe is wrong.
>
>
> I’m not really sure whether that means something went wrong or not, so
> I followed the next bit which says:

The warning is not serious.

> [kernel 2.6]
> # $/sbin/insmod rt2870sta.ko
> # $/sbin/ifconfig ra0 inet YOUR_IP up
>
> and got this:
>
> # /sbin/insmod rt2870sta.o
> insmod: error inserting ‘rt2870sta.o’: -1 Invalid module format

Did you really type …o? It should be …ko.

> That one obviously means something is wrong, but I have no idea what
> … maybe the driver really isn’t 64 bit as claimed

When you compile a driver, it is automatically set to be the right flavor.

Larry

> Any ideas?
>
>