make a usb wireless dongle work

[rastro123]

Hi folks, Im fairly new to linux. My laptop is hp dv5 with broadcom 4312 wireless. I read that linksys wireless dongle wusb54gc v3 works ok for all the tricks in bt4, but I dont know how to make it work. The cd that came with it is just for windows. Aparantly I need a driver called rt73. but I dont know how to install it or how to disable the inbuilt broadcom and use the linksys. Can anyone pls tell me where to go to learn or give me some helping advice pls. Many thanks.
Ive got three drivers downloaded:railink rt73 and a couple of others, but dont know what to do with them. Ive got no hair now cos Ive pulled it all out. please can someone help me?

[reed9]

The driver should be in the kernel since 2.6.25. But you may need firmware. Please post the output of

dmesg | grep firmware

And just to confirm, post the output of

lspci
lsmod

as well. (Two separate commands.)

What distro are you using?

[reed9]

Whoops, it's a USB wireless adapter. Scratch the lspci bit and give us lsusb

[rastro123]

hello mr reed 9!
Right, I just typed in the first command (dmesg | grep firmware) and absolutely nothing came up or was displayed. 2.6.28-14 I think is the kernal. - Im using jaunty ubuntu at the moment, but want to get this wireless dongle working so that I can use back track 4 and any other distro that doesn't support broadcom 4312. - I read somewhere that if I try ndis it wont let me use all the tricks in bt.
This is the result of lsusb:
boo@boo-laptop:~$ lsusb
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 1737:0077 Linksys
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0408:03ba Quanta Computer, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 011: ID 1c4f:0003
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
- as you can see the linksys shows up 2nd one down.
These are the three - I think they're the drivers, that I've downloaded, but been to so many sites, I can't remember where I got them from now:raillinkdriver2009_0206_RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.1. 0.2.tar.bz2 and rt73-k2wrlz-2.0.1.tar.bz2 and rt2570-k2wrlz-1.6.1.tar.bz2
I tried to extract the first one, but to be honest, I didnt know what I was doing. I think it extracted, (in the same dir src) but the wireless dongle still won't work. Thanks a lot.

[reed9]

No return on the dmesg | grep firmware just means there were no messages with the word firmware in them.

I didn't a little more digging around, and while the rt73 driver is included in the kernel, the newer driver is rt73usb and may be the one you want. Here are instructions for installing in Jaunty.

Ralink RT73 USB Wifi Driver (patched for injection & frag) + DKMS in Jaunty (9.04) - Ubuntu Forums

[rastro123]

hi thanks a lot for the page link, however Im still getting stuck!
I type in: sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rt73.conf into my terminal and it then gives something looking like this with writing at the top of the terminal box and writing at the bottom, and also it stays highlighted:

GNU nano 2.0.9 Fichero: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rt73.conf Modificado




















[ Archivo nuevo ]
^G Ver ayuda ^O Guardar ^R Leer Fich ^Y Pág Ant ^K Cortar Tex^C Pos actual
^X Salir ^J Justificar^W Dónde Está^V Pág Sig ^U PegarTxt ^T Ortografía

Then I paste the following in:

# Blacklist rt73usb (mac80211) as it's beta and conflicts with the
# stable ieee80211 based rt73 module
blacklist rt73usb

# Other modules that possibly conflict with rt73
blacklist rt2500usb
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2x00usb

and it pastes into the middle, and I dont know what to do after this. If I then try to close the terminal to carry on with the next command it tell me there is a process in action and I will lose it if I close. Can you pls explain this to me. Thanks a lot. Oh sorry for the spanish wording, its where I reside normally, so the system is in spanish.

[reed9]

nano is a command line text editor. After you paste or write in your content, press CTRL+X to save and exit.

You can replace nano with any other text editor of your choice, such as gedit.

[rastro123]

many thanks just read your mess. Im on the case now.

[rastro123]

well, I followed the instructions and after the terminal looked as it did in my privious post, I hit control and x, but it didn't go away until I pressed enter. I thought it was going ok, but then went to make the tarball in the next step, and I get errors:
boo@boo-laptop:~/rt73-k2wrlz-3.0.3$ tar czf rt73-k2wrlz-3.0.3-dkms.tar.gz rt73-k2wrlz-3.0.3
tar: rt73-k2wrlz-3.0.3: No se puede stat: No existe el fichero ó directorio
tar: Salida con error demorada desde errores anteriores
boo@boo-laptop:~/rt73-k2wrlz-3.0.3$
In between time I installed this rutil, but I think it may have gone into the dirctory for this tar ball. Any advice pls. - Should I uninstall everything Ive done and start again, and if so how? What do you think ?