I was using the rt2500 driver with my wireless card, "RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI". However, I ran into a number of problems. 1) I set the ESSID and key, "ifconfig ra0", and run Ethereal on it, to see if it connected. Later, if I run "rmmod rt2500"... It freezes. Any other program that tries to access the card freezes, too (and cannot be killed). It is impossible to cleanly reboot the computer, either. The driver prints the following message to the system log, about every second: unregister_netdevice: waiting for ra0 to become free. Usage count = 2 "lsmod" reports the usage count as 0, though. 2) In /etc/Wireless/RT2500STA/RT2500STA.dat, I set the key as a 10-digit number, with type "0". However, the driver interprets it as a 26-digit hex number (at least, iwconfig displays it as "0550-3924-1044-0000-0000-0000-00") 3) Just the fact that the driver requires a /etc/Wireless/RT2500STA/RT2500STA.dat file. Since it's wireless, it should not be tied to one particular network. Instead, settings should be easily changed with "iwconfig". Without the file however, in order to set the ESSID and other settings, I have to wait for some amount of time after loading the driver (otherwise, "iwconfig" silently fails). And that doesn't work with the init.d script, of course.
Thank You for Your report. Please let us know: a. what kernel version do You run and if the config is a default one b. what is driver version as to Your points: 1. this was a problem of driver partialy solved by new version and proper kernel parameters (.config). We can not help here. 2. This is unfortunately driver problem. Please use /etc/conf.d/net (example given at the bottom) 3. This issue is because of driver architecture. Please notice, that Gentoo people didn't develop or maintain driver, and most of the issues should be resolved on the upstream level. I recommend You rt2x00.serialmonkey.com which is home page of driver with great help on their forums. I personally use currently beta3 driver with 2.6.16 (gentoo-sources) with proper /etc/conf.d/net configuration, and default .DAT file with no (currently :) problems. I use in net file: --- modules=( "iwconfig" ) config_ra0=("192.168.35.1/24 brd 192.168.35.255" ) essid_ra0="white" mode_ra0="ad-hoc" channel_ra0="6" # WEP ENABLED key_white="s:mypassword restricted" --- I admit that driver is a not good one, buggy and sometimes behaves oddly. Gentoo can't help here. If uberlord agrees, I suggest to mark it as resolved/upstream.
Oh, well, I know it's not Gentoo's fault - but I got an impression that I should file bugs here, instead of upstream :) Sorry. I'll read the forums. I'm using 2.6.16-suspend2-r4. Do you know what .config options will fix the "usage count"?
SMP and 4KSTACKS were things to tweak to reach stable kernel with this driver.
(In reply to comment #2) > Oh, well, I know it's not Gentoo's fault - but I got an impression that I > should file bugs here, instead of upstream :) Sorry. I'll read the forums. We like you to do both :)
