Wireless troubles

[Katashi]

Since you seem rather new to this, and may have never done this before, you will need to experiment a little. Nothing is better than actual experience, and this usually involves making mistakes, too.

There is a How-To sticky dealing with program installation in Linux. Please read it, and use it as a general guide. When you get errors, post the first error that it gives. We will try and help you get past it.

How To Install Software in Linux

For this driver, you should follow the section about Compiling and Installing Software From Source.

Awesome, will do. I have been using Google to find a guide for this. I'm surprised the link to that guide didn't come up.

[Katashi]

I attempted to install wpa_supplicant and the driver by following the guide. I'm not so worried about wpa_supplicant because you had told me that the driver needed to be installed before hand. But I ran into an error. I made the directory and unpacked the files into it. But when I went to configure it I got this.

eric@eric-desktop:~$ cd /home/eric/src
eric@eric-desktop:~/src$ ls
2008_0918_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.8.0.0.tar.bz2 wpa_supplicant-0.6.8.tar.gz
wpa_supplicant-0.6.8
eric@eric-desktop:~/src$ tar -jxvf 2008_8918_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.8.0.0.tar.bz2
tar: 2008_8918_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.8.0.0.tar.bz2: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
eric@eric-desktop:~/src$

Edit: Actually reading over that I remember that I got the wpa_supplicant unpacked. This is the error I got when I was trying to install the driver.

[waterhead]

You misspelled the name of the driver.

[Katashi]

So step 5 of the README is to type this in. But I got this error. I tried from regular user and sudo. Obviously it doesn't see the file. But do I need to go and make it? Or can I skip this step?

eric@eric-desktop:~/src/2008_0918_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.8.0.0$ cp RT2860STA.dat /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat
cp: cannot create regular file `/etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat': No such file or directory
eric@eric-desktop:~/src/2008_0918_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.8.0.0$ sudo cp RT2860STA.dat /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat
[sudo] password for eric:
cp: cannot create regular file `/etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat': No such file or directory
eric@eric-desktop:~/src/2008_0918_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.8.0.0$

[waterhead]

Did the driver install? I think that it creates the /etc/Wireless folder at installation. Remember, I said you also need to run the make install command.

Otherwise, you can create the folder.

sudo mkdir /etc/Wireless

sudo mkdir /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA

[Katashi]

Did the driver install? I think that it creates the /etc/Wireless folder at installation. Remember, I said you also need to run the make install command.

Otherwise, you can create the folder.

sudo mkdir /etc/Wireless

sudo mkdir /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA

I didn't run the make install yet because it wasn't next on the README. But I will try it and see what happens.

[Katashi]

Ok that worked. I'm down to where you load the driver. The README says /sbin/insmod rt2860.ko it comes back with an error of "insmod: can't read 'rt2860sta.ko' : No such file or directory" What did I do now lol.

[waterhead]

You need to use sudo, you need root permissions to load or unload or insert modules.

[waterhead]

If the insmod command still doesn't work, you can try a different way to load a module.

 sudo modprobe rt2860

If that returns a blank prompt, then it loaded. You can check the output of lsmod for it, it should be at the top of the list. Then run this command.

sudo depmod -a

As usual, if you want to know more about the commands that I am telling you to run, use the --help option after the command. Also use the man command to view the manual.

man insmod

depmod --help

[Katashi]

I did it with both, same error.