level 1 wnc-0301 & Kubbuntu Edgy & wpa

Some days ago I bought a 'level 1 wnc-0301' pci wlan-card. Here a some instructions how to use this card in wpa-psk mode with Kubuntu 6.1 (Edgy) and KNetworkmanager. Installation can be painful since a lot of contradicting information regarding this card are online (so this is another contribution to this mess).

1. Chip
Some online sources claim that this card uses the Ralink 2500 chip. This might be right in some cases, but at least my card has a Ralink RT61 chip.

2. Problems with standard Kubuntu driver
The driver coming with Edgy doesn't work. The card gets identified correctly out of the box and network scanning is possible (e.g with wlassistant). Unfortunately connecting to networks (even open ones) doesn't work. Additionally KNetworkmanager thinks it is a wired card and as a result is not even offering a possibility to scan for networks. I tried to make a connection with the Ralink-cards related tool RutilT (Version 0.13) but without success.

3. Problems with fresh linux drivers
Fresh drivers (cvs- and beta-versions) are available from the rt2x00-project. After downloading I found the following warning message inside:

NOTE: This driver at this point in time is largely untested.
It basically consists of the base rt61 driver code released by Ralink with
a number of assorted fixes out of the rt2500 tree applied. More fixes need
to be brought over from the rt2500 tree before this driver can be considered
"beta-quality"

There are some positive but also many negative user experiences regarding this driver online. Because of this I took the decision to try to install the card with NDISWrapper first (which works fine with this card).

4. NDISWrapper
The version of NDISWrapper that comes with Kubuntu Edgy is buggy according to several sources online. Because of this I compiled and installed the latest version of NDISWrapper manually. The README and INSTALL files are easy understandable for experienced linux users.

Here are the basic steps I took:

4a. For unloading the buggy standard driver:
- sudo su
- modprobe -r rt61pci

4b. For installing NDISWrapper:
- Downloading of the newest version (version 1.39 in my case)
- Unpacking the file.
- apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev (and kernel-headers according to the installed kernel)
- Make
- sudo su
- make install

4c. Then I had to setup my card with NDISWrapper. For doing this, Windows-drivers are needed. The driver on the product CD-ROM doesn't work well with NDISWrapper. E.g. it seems to be impossible to connect to wpa-protected networks. On this page I found the information that the chip works well with a windows-driver-package available from Ralinktech (which is right).
I downloaded the package which unfortunately is a exe-file. Since I don't have a Windows-installation (and orange & cabextract failed) the next task was to get to the driver-files inside with the help of wine.

4d. The downloaded exe-file includes drivers for all versions of Windows. After executing drivers according to the running operating system get installed. NDISWrapper may need the drivers for Windows XP. Because of this I configured wine to tell the software that Windows XP is running. This can be done with the gui-tool 'winecfg'. Otherwise the driver for Windows 2000 would have been installed.
Then I started the exe-file with wine and said next/ok up to the point were the installation routine extracts all files (don't answer any messages after this point!). The the driver is now available at '~/.wine/drive_c/program files/RALINK/RT6x Wireless LAN Card/Installer/WINXP' or similar. Copy this folder to another place. Add to this folder also all files you can find at '~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/drivers' (or similar) that end with '.bin'.

4e. In order to load the windows-driver, do the following:
- sudo su
- cd /path/to/windows-driver
- ndiswrapper -i rt61.inf
- ndiswrapper -m
- Add the following line to: '/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist':
blacklist rt61pci
- Add the following new line to '/etc/modules':
ndiswrapper
- depmod -a
- /etc/init.d/networking restart

5. KNetworkmanager
For using wpa it easiest to take KNetworkmanager. For this the following is needed:
- apt-get install wpasupplicant network-manager knetworkmanager
- Open '/etc/network/interfaces' as root. Comment out everything other than “lo” entries in that file.
- Create a file called '/etc/default/wpasupplicant' and add the following line:
ENABLED=0- touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant
- /etc/init.d/dbus restart

5a. You might find it annoying that KNetworkmanager ask for the kwalled-password every time it connects to an protected network. If you don't like this, just configure kwalled to use an empty password.

5b. KNetworkmanager might freeze after rebooting. If you configure kde to start with a fresh session after every reboot this problem disappears. In order to start KNetworkmanager after every reboot make an entry in '~/.kde/Autostart'.

Ready (-:

UPDATE 28.04.07: Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)
Yesterday I upgraded to Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty). My 'level 1 wnc-0301' pci wlan-card does still not work out of the box. My instructions are most of the time still valid for Kubuntu 7.04. However, some smaller changes are necessary:
- Kubuntu loads the module rt61 instead of rt61pci in oder to use the card out of the box. Modify my instructions above accordingly.
- KNetworkmanager works out of the box. In case your the WLAN-Card doesn't appear, activate it under "Manual Configuration". Sometimes KNetworkmanager needs several attempts to connect to wpa-protected networks.