USB WiFi adapter with rt2870 chipset won't connect

Hi Nick,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ .

If it remains an issue, could you run the following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux 549801

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

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Hi Jeremy,

As of a few days ago with 10.04 RC this still an issue.

More info: This usb wifi adapter/chipset worked in 9.04. It did not and has not since 9.10. This is a regression.

I will see about testing with 10.04 once the ga is released.

Regards

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I have now tested with 10.04 ga. This bug is still there.

apport information uploaded as requested

My observations: It appears that both the RaLink provided driver and the open source driver for this device are being loaded. If the open source driver(s) is blacklisted then the device works. If I blacklist the RaLink driver and leave the open source driver loading the device does not work.

Bottom line: The RaLink driver appears to work fine. The open source driver is broken. Why are both drivers for this device being loaded?

Cheers

Nick,
    i don't have much of an idea on that. Let me get this in front of a Kernel Engineer and see what they find. I've marked this bug Triaged toward that end.

Thanks!

~JFo

JFo,

Thanks.

FYI: I've been following the Ubuntu Network and Wireless forum lately. I'm seeing a lot of requests for help from users that have usb wifi adapters based on this chipset. This chipset is evidently fairly popular.

Cheers

I have discovered that there are more problems with Ralink support on the modern chipsets that what has been reported in this bug. The included Ralink driver (Ubuntu 10.04) doesn't seem to support WiFi N and secure connections. It is possible to gain WiFi N and secure connection support by downloading and compiling a driver from Ralink. Link that provides more info:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1470529

I am disappointed in the Linux Foundation because I went with Ralink because they claim Ralink is open source friendly. My experience does not indicate Ralink is friendly.

FYI: The following bugs are either closely related to this bug or are dupes:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/573905

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/543836

I was actually surprised when the wireless usb adapter began to work. I was running 9.1, and after a first (fatal) install of 10.04 I am running ubuntu again. The currently trouble with the wireless devices seems to be purely related to WPA and WPA2. I was already broadcasting AES only, and am still receiving the authentication prompt instead of being logged onto the network.

I am able to post, because I am also able to authenticate to a network which uses WEP.
My wireless info: lsusb | grep rt
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 13b1:0020 Linksys WUSB54GC 802.11g Adapter [ralink rt73]

Which suggests that the bug is not only related to the rt2870 chipset.

I would like to find a workaround, and see the issue solved soon, since so far the rest of the release is pretty cool.

I see the same behavior as reported in the original post on Maverick Alpha. My device is a Linksys W600USBN usb wi-fi adapter built around the RT2870 chipset.

Device is detected and initialized at boot and is able to complete a WPA2 secured link with my access point. Connection drops after some activity on the link and cannot be reinitialized except by resetting the machine.

Blacklisting the community drivers as per the OP allows the device to work normally and reliably.

After a few months I decided to give this a go again. I've got my RT2870 device working and working like it should! Im not sure if theres is much difference between using a card or usb dongle but ill share my configuration. Im using the Rosewill RNX EasyN1 b/g/n dongle working with N speeds. There was a new usb driver released 6/25/10. Went about installing driver as usual enabling wpa_supplicant in the os/linux/config.mk directory. After installed copied the RT2870STA.dat to /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/RT2870STA.dat. I did modify the file though. See below, I followed Pauls advice and included the password.

The following settings were changed in RT2870STA.dat:
CountryRegion=0 ##Changed from 5
SSID=******** ##Router SSID
WirelessMode=9 ##Changed to reflect b/g/n mode
AuthMode=WPA2PSK ##Changed from "OPEN"
WPAPSK=********* ##Router Password

Seems to be working perfect for me now.

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/573905. I've just apport-collected it on Maverick daily CD from today 24-Sep-2010.

I guess the reports might be duplicates, but I'll leave the decision to sombody who knows.

With Conceptronic C300RU (ralink rt2870), blacklisting "rt2800usb" worked in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid.

This is the output of lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 14b2:3c28 Ralink Technology, Corp.

Please ignore comment #33. It turned out that my device (D-Link DWA-140 B2) contains an RT3070, not an RT2870. Getting the driver source from Ralink and building makes it work on Lucid; Maverick not yet tested

Sorry about the noise.

I had this issue some months ago with 10.04 and I came across this thread. I followed the steps above to blacklist rt2800usb and then installed the backports compat wireless package and things worked fine.

Today, I upgraded to 10.10 and it all fell apart again. I made sure I had the correct backports package, tried both with and without blacklisting rt2800usb, still won't work. Interestingly, NetworkManager does actually detect the device and does detect various access points - but is just unable to connect to any of them.

Has anyone tried this with 10.10?

Yes, I have tried the device shown in the original bug report. I tested with a system booted to a Ubuntu 10.10 cd. The device initially connected with my access point (g, no security) and I was able to surf for about 1 minute. It then disconnected and I could never get it to reconnect.

Support for the Ralink rt2870 chipset still appears to be very broken.

Further information:

See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9999520

Here is a quote from the thread the above link points to:

"Ubuntu 10.04
Most of the previous solutions refer to the rt2870 driver with Ubuntu 10.04.
Blacklisting the rt28xx driver as described before, and compiling your own driver works here, although you need to compile again after each kernel update.

As of kernel 2.6.33-xx it should be built in.

Ubuntu 10.10
Ubuntu 10.10 has the rt2870 driver built into the kernel, with 2 problems:
- You stil need to blacklist the rt28xx drivers as @chili555 points out
- You can only make a connection at 'g-speed' (max 54mpbs), no 'n-speed' (270/300 mbps) as @zipeppe found out

Compiling your own kernel to solve this problem, results in a lot of compiling errors.
Putting /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/ into /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/RT2870STA.dat does not solve it either.
It seems we indeed have to wait for RalinkTech to publish a new driver as @negora suggests ..."

End quote.

Comment: Support for the widely used RT2870 chipset is still badly broken and users worldwide are suffering. Help!

This bug is still present in Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 2.

I have a eeepc netbook with rt28xx chipset. The problem is there in 10.04, 10.10 and as Nick said, 11.04 a2. I seriously hope this bug can be fixed. What is the point of using ubuntu if you cannot connect to the internet?

And this is not some odd chipset. This is widely used!

Reply to comment #40:

It is evident that Canonical's priorities do not include wifi. You can go to Ubuntuforums and see a constant flow of problems related to wifi. The same problems over and over, year after year. I could somewhat understand this if we were dealing with companies that do not cooperate with the open source community. However, Ralink, Realtek, Atheros, Broadcom (recently) do cooperate. Good quality drivers are available to be included in Ubuntu and the kernel. What we have in Ubuntu is either old drivers or no drivers and/or bad configurations.

Why is it that this chipset works plug and play with Linux Mint Debian but is a cluster *uck with Ubuntu?

I blacklisted the drivers listed above and more as suggested by

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1592731&highlight=rt2860

blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2x00pci
blacklist rt2x00usb

and I still cannot get the rt2870 from ralink to compile.

After the blacklisting above, I also reinstalled jockey-common, as the stock rt2870sta was wiped out by my attempts to make and install the one from the ralink website. I also installed linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid generic. No luck.

Mark, you likely have a mess on your hands now. Good luck.

And did I mention that this is a REGRESSION? Anyone listening? I thought REGRESSIONS were given a high priority. This worked in 9.04. I bought this usb wifi adapter based on the FACT that it worked plug and play in 9.04.

REGRESSION!
REGRESSION!
REGRESSION!

Anyone listening?

REGRESSION!

This bug is likely a duplicate of Bug #460323 which is marked fix committed.

Unfortunately there is no information about the fix nor any indication what version of 11.04 (alpha, beta) we should try in an effort to verify if this bug is indeed fixed. I'll wait and test 11.04ga unless I get a request to test an earlier version.

Nick, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p linux <replace-with-bug-number>

Also, could you please test the latest upstream kernel available following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds ? It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Please do not test the daily kernel folder, but the one all the way at the bottom. Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please comment on which kernel version specifically you tested. If this bug is fixed in the mainline kernel, please add the following tags:
kernel-fixed-upstream
kernel-fixed-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

where VERSION-NUMBER is the version number of the kernel you tested. For example:
kernel-fixed-upstream-v3.11.1

This can be done by clicking on the yellow circle with a black pencil icon next to the word Tags located at the bottom of the bug description. As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

If the mainline kernel does not fix this bug, please add the following tags:
kernel-bug-exists-upstream
kernel-bug-exists-upstream-VERSION-NUMBER

As well, please remove the tag:
needs-upstream-testing

Once testing of the upstream kernel is complete, please mark this bug's Status as Confirmed. Please let us know your results. Thank you for your understanding.

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]