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Asus 1000H Wireless LAN on Fedora Core 9

November 8, 2008 By miketeo

I have gotten my wireless LAN on my Asus eeePC 1000h working on Linux fedora core 9 distro. The following records the steps that I have performed to get the RaLink wireless device working. You should be comfortable in editing files and running commands via terminal shell.

1. Pre-Checks

First, you need to have an Internet connection to your eeePC first. Otherwise, you will have problems downloading the drivers and updating your fedora distro. The updated kernels for FC9 contains support the wired LAN on eeePC, so you can download the latest src rpm for FC9 and rebuild it on your machine.

On my eeePC, the lspci output contains the following lines. You might want to check if that’s the case for your machine.

01:00.0 Network controller: RaLink Unknown device 0781
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp. Unknown device 1026 (rev b0)

Now login to your superuser account and get ready to install the wireless driver.

2. Install rpms

Update your kernel and install kernel development support rpm for your machine.

$> yum upgrade kernel

$> yum install kernel-devel patch

Install or upgrade wpa_supplicant and chkconfig

$> yum install wpa_supplicant chkconfig

After the upgrades, reboot your machine to use the new kernel!

3. Installing RaLink Driver

Download the latest RT2860 Linux driver from http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Linux.html. At this point in time, I’m using version 1.8.0.0 dated 09/18/2008.
Uncompress the driver source.

Edit os/linux/config.mk. Change the following lines to these:

# Support Wpa_Supplicant
HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y

# Support Native WpaSupplicant for Network Maganger
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y

In os/linux folder, run this command:
```
$> patch sta_ioctl.c sta_ioctl.c.patch
```
Then change directory to your 2008_0918_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.8.0.0 folder and run make.
```
$> make
```
The driver will be compiled. It is not unusual to see a few warnings.
Once the compilation has finished, run make install to install the module to the kernel folder.
```
$> make install
```
Attempt to activate the wireless module and see if it works.
```
$> modprobe rt2860sta
```
Check if you have the wireless module.
```
$> iwconfig
```
Your wireless device should be ra0.
Edit /etc/modprobe.conf and add the following lines:
```
alias ra0 rt2860
```

Activate wpa_supplicant to run on startup

$> chkconfig --level 35 wpa_supplicant on

Reboot your machine

4. Wireless LAN Settings

After your machine has rebooted, check your ifconfig output. It should list ra0 as one of the network devices.

$> ifconfig ra0

If the output is empty, or there is an error. Check that your lsmod output and ensure that you see that rt2860sta is being listed as one of the modules.

$> lsmod

Use your NetworkManager to add in your wireless settings.
I have gotten mine to work with my Linksys WAP54G router in WPA. This is what I have for my ifconfig output

ra0       Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:15:AF:CB:79:6D 
          inet addr:192.168.1.27  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::215:afff:fecb:796d/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:73156 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:6740 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:11221633 (10.7 MiB)  TX bytes:1194706 (1.1 MiB)
          Interrupt:19

and my iwconfig output:

ra0       RT2860 Wireless  ESSID:"masked"  Nickname:"RT2860STA"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.452 GHz  Access Point: 00:1E:E5:F4:08:4D
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:1234-1234-2313-BA7A-DBE1-6A3B-BDA0-71DC
          Link Quality=100/100  Signal level:-38 dBm  Noise level:-81 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

That’s all, folks. Good luck to your setup.

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