Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset [LWN.net]

Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 11, 2007 8:41 UTC (Fri) by ca9mbu (subscriber, #11098)
In reply to: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset by drag
Parent article: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

"Drivers can be found at:
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rt2x0..."

I went and bought myself a Ralink based PCI (rt61 chipset) card because of their supposed good driver support (I didn't want to have to use binary drivers, ndiswrapper, etc.). There are currently 3 different flavours of Ralink drivers (4 if you include Ralinks binary drivers):

1) rt61 - legacy driver, supports WEP encryption.
2) rt61pci - rt2x00, purportedly supports WPA encryption but I've never got this driver to be able to scan my wireless network. Even if it did, NetworkManager wouldn't be able to deal with it because it doesn't use WirelessExt to provide this support. From what I've read, I think this means one has to download binary firmware blobs and edit a config file to get WPA support, but can't confirm that.
3) The new git head code - this is based on the mac80211 stack. Now that things have started settling down in the upstream kernel in terms of the favoured/de-facto standard wireless stack I'm pretty confident that this version of the driver will find its way upstream too, and all of us with Ralink hardware will get out-of-the-box support for it. You can bet your bottom dollar on there being plenty of announcements when this (and other out-of-tree drivers that are in a similar position) get merged upstream!

In the mean time though, confusion abounds as google is filled with out-of-date information, or inaccurate info based on the enormous confusion caused by the various rewrites of the driver and their various configuration quirks. The following maybe full of inaccuracies too but it's the best my failing memory can recall at the moment:

Ubuntu Edgy wanted to load rt61pci by default, which wouldn't scan for wireless networks. One had to blacklist that and get the legacy rt61 module to be loaded instead. Even then, that didn't work for me. Only with Feisty, where they reverted to the legacy rt61 driver can I finally connect to my wireless network, though I've had to drop down to WEP as it doesn't support WPA!

Hopefully Gutsy will come with the new wireless stack, compatible ralink driver and I'll have one less thing to concern myself as it enters the "Just Works" list.

Matt.

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Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 11, 2007 9:58 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

For best performance I found you'll have to completely get rid of network manager, plus any thing like dbhcdbd that cache dhcp information.

Then you have to use the rutilT program. http://cbbk.free.fr/bonrom/

It's a very simple program, just scans the network then feeds the essid/channel/ap information to the internet and runs dhclient, but I think the author is able to take into account quirks and such that the normal network manager stuff doesn't.

You have to make sure that you have the device up before starting the program (I put ifconfig ra0 up).

Still though sometimes I have to take the interface down, unload the module, and reload the module for it to work.

And it's just to bad, this driver has been in constant development for about 3 or more years now.

I have owned 3 devices.. rt61 PCI card, rt2500 PCI card, and a Rt2570 USB card. With the Rt61 I was able to even perform some advanced things like packet injection attacks for making wep protected networks spew arp packets. (for research only!! Honest!!)

Also besides the ralink stuff, I've owned a broadcom bcm43xx (Apple Airport Extreme) (which sucked; but thank goodness for the good folks who reverse engineered documentation and the good folks that took that documentation and made it work.), a 'Prism54' PCI card, and a Prism54 PCMCIA card.. both were the original 'FullMac' devices

(totally depressing story about conextent destroying prism54 cards compatibility and then lied about it. Those prism54 drivers were one of the few early Linux 802.11g success stories until Conextant bought up the company that made them).