rt61pci fails to locate wireless networks

Could you try restarting networking ('sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart') and see if there is a line that says something like "[ 5169.784764] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): ra0: link is not ready" in the output of dmesg?

I was using the backports driver for a little over a week, and an update ended up breaking it for me after I rebooted. Removing it and going back to the stock driver (the one that probably locks up your PC) will give the same message, but after a while it eventually will associate and give me an IP address. Prior to the update that broke the backports driver the stock one didn't have any problems other than instability.

Currently I'm using drivers from the compat-wireless "package" from linuxwireless.org. Thus far the one I've compiled & installed (5/5/2008) has been working fine.

Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
Wireless driver: rt61pci

I have tried installing multiple drivers for the rt61 chip. The drivers available on the ralink website manage to find my AP every time (using sudo iwlist scan) but I couldn't find any decent documentation on how to establish a WPA2 connection. I also tried the drivers from compat-wireless at linuxwireless.org but they are giving the same error in dmesg that you are describing: "[ 3757.690818] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready" whenever I run "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart". I'm not quite sure what this message is actually saying. I can't seem to find any other debug information in other log files. When compiling the compat-wireless drivers, I modified the config.mk to add both "CONFIG_RT2X00_LIB_DEBUGFS=y" and "CONFIG_RT2X00_DEBUG=y" but that didn't seem to generate any extra error messages.

If you look in the README file in the Module directory for Ralink's drivers they give instructions on how to configure it using the rt61sta.dat file. You'll be particularly interested in the AuthMode and EncrypType entries, though you need to fill out the other relevant sections (WPA key, SSID, etc).

As for the link not ready error, I noticed something strange. While the compat-wireless drivers were working fine, I started getting the same error again after a power outage made me reboot my PC. If I blacklist the driver(s) (rt61 if you have it installed and rt61pci), reboot so the driver isn't loaded, comment out the rt61pci entry in the blacklist and insert the driver I connect without a problem. I guess the reason why it worked fine the first time I tried it was because I already had the rt61pci driver blacklisted so I could use the rt61 legacy driver, and since I uninstalled the legacy driver my system was "clean". I'm still not sure why the driver doesn't work if it loads at boot time, though...

As for the debug configs, it doesn't create any extra error messages. If you have a debugfs mounted somewhere (I added an fstab entry to mount it at /sys/kernel/debug) there is extra debug information the driver makes available, the most notable of which are the card's registers. IvD has an updated script that dumps the registers on the rt2x00 forums at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4660

Thanks for the link to that script. Where is the best place to file a bug report about this issue? I can't see any bug-reporting area on the serialmonkey website.

I usually see bugs reported in the rt2x00 forums. You'll want to attach the outputs of dmesg, lspci -vvnn, and the regdump script to the post.

I'll also mention that the bug that was reported today at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4801 might be related. I've found that if I tried to scan for a network after restarting the networking script (I use the standard interfaces file instead of NetworkManager) that it would return "no results available". If I scanned before restarting networking it will detect my router. It might be worth mentioning in the bug report if you can reproduce it.

That bug report on the forums was my one :)

The dmesg output line that I mentioned "ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0:
link is not ready" appears after I boot up the computer, without
touching any network configs/settings. It also appears after every
time I run "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart".

I've noted issues with RT61PCI driver that were only resolved till I upgraded to kernel version 2.6.31. See my notes under:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-backports-modules-2.6.27/+bug/287711/comments/35
and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/366170/comments/9

Tomas, can you confirm comment #7? Thank you!

I no longer have this hardware, so I am unable to do any testing on this.