Mint 8 and a USB wifi dongle

[reed9]

Hmm, now only a wlan2 is mentioned in there.

Did you retry iwlist? Any result? What is the output of

lsmod
iwconfig

[paulnrhodes]

paulnrhodes@paulnrhodes-laptop ~ $ iwlist
Usage: iwlist [interface] scanning [essid NNN] [last]
              [interface] frequency 
              [interface] channel 
              [interface] bitrate 
              [interface] rate 
              [interface] encryption 
              [interface] keys 
              [interface] power 
              [interface] txpower 
              [interface] retry 
              [interface] ap 
              [interface] accesspoints 
              [interface] peers 
              [interface] event 
              [interface] auth 
              [interface] wpakeys 
              [interface] genie 
              [interface] modulation 
paulnrhodes@paulnrhodes-laptop ~ $

[paulnrhodes]

    
paulnrhodes@paulnrhodes-laptop ~ $ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

irda0     no wireless extensions.

wmaster0  no wireless extensions.

wlan2     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:""  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated   
          Tx-Power=19 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

paulnrhodes@paulnrhodes-laptop ~ $

[reed9]

Sorry, I meant the full iwlist command as I suggested before.

sudo ifconfig wlan2 up
sudo iwlist wlan2 scan

[paulnrhodes]

paulnrhodes@paulnrhodes-laptop ~ $ sudo ifconfig wlan2 up
paulnrhodes@paulnrhodes-laptop ~ $ sudo iwlist wlan scan
wlan Interface doesn't support scanning.

paulnrhodes@paulnrhodes-laptop ~ $

[reed9]

Ok, let's try the other way then.

Open up /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf

Remove the line blacklist rt2500usb and replace with blacklist rt73usb. Reboot, check iwconfig for the interface name and try the above again, plus dmesg output.