[WYLUG-HELP] wireless lan notebook card installation

[lists at mungewell.org]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 08:01:21PM +0000, Mike Goodman wrote:
> Hi, Folks,
> 
> I just bought a cheap, hope it will make me cheerful, Cable & Wireless
> 802.11g LAN Notebook Card (£19.99 from Comet's Birstall branch) for my
> Acer Aspire 3002LC laptop running FC4. The chipset is rt2500 which I had
> to download the driver for separately and it seems to have installed OK.
> 
> The card's lights come on at boot up but no signal as far as I can see
> and at network restart command I get:
> 
> Bringing up interface wlan0:
> Determining IP information for wlan0:. . . Failed
> 
> Where do I start? Is there any more info I can offer to help with a
> diagnosis?
> 

Google ;-)

Here a link to a SuSE how-to on that card. It seems that the rt2500
drivers use the name 'ra0' for the interface name which is rather stupid
(in my opinion).

http://home.bb-zone.com/index.php/Ralink_RT2500_Linux_Howto

Your have to change the scripts that expect the wireless interface to be
called 'wlan0' to make calls using 'ra0'

You could just type the commands yourself, I would expect a suitable
sequence would be:
	ifconfig ra0 up
	iwconfig ra0 essid <your_essid>
	iwconfig ra0 key <your_key>
	iwconfig ra0 mode managed
	pump -i ra0 

Cheers,
Simon