Help required with USB wireless LAN

[g-banjo]

Hi there, back to MInt after a couple of years absence and finding it hard to remember things - never got past the newbie stage anyway.
Trying to install an Edup EP-MS1552 USB wireless Lan adapter.
Getting very slow connection and frequent password requests. Mint (14) seems to be using the rt2800usb driver whereas the chipset is, I believe, Ralink 5372.
How can I install the correct drivers? Is it possible to install drivers from CD?

[g-banjo]

The driver on the CD is rt2870 but there doesn't seem to be an executable file that I can recognise. Surely there must be an easy way to install a driver from CD?

[flyboy1565]

Check you're software manager and choose additional drivers, that should show your wireless stick

Sent from my ADR6350 using Tapatalk 2

[g-banjo]

Nope, Additional Drivers isn't showing anything.

[AlbertP]

@ flyboy1565: Additional Drivers does not include any drivers for USB wireless so far (it does have drivers for internal wifi, however), this is not a proprietary driver.

@ g-banjo: Could you run this command in terminal and post the output:

Code: Select all

inxi -N

I indeed read on the internet that it's a Ralink RT5372. That one could be made working.

[flyboy1565]

Thanks banjo for the info

Sent from my ADR6350 using Tapatalk 2

[g-banjo]

Network: Card 1: {my redundant ethernet card}
Card 2: Ralink driver: rt2800usb

[AlbertP]

Ok, that only tells us that it's a Ralink. Which was not surprising since it used the rt2800usb driver. Could you run lsusb and post the ID of the "Ralink" device?

[g-banjo]

Yep, it's a 5372

[AlbertP]

Ok, so its ID is 148f:5372? Ralink RT5372 indeed. (You can't always trust device IDs, sometimes a number visible in the ID is a bit different from the actual chip number, but in this case they are the same)

Support for the RT5372 in the preinstalled rt2800usb driver is quite new so it may not be fully working yet - Mint 14 is the first Mint version to have RT5372 support preinstalled. We can try installing a newer version of rt2800usb. Usually rt2800usb is of better quality than Ralink's own drivers, so I prefer trying this first.

You can download a package with newer drivers from here: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel ... 7-1.tar.xz
After downloading and extracting the file, go to the folder where you extracted it, and right-click > Open in Terminal, then run these commands in terminal:

Code: Select all

./scripts/driver-select rt2x00
make
sudo make install

Then please reboot.

[g-banjo]

Well, all went fine until the "make".
A whole list of drivers started to compile then I got a fatal error on a radeon one:

fatal error: sys/types.h: no such file or directory
compilation terminated

so it never got as far as rt drivers.

[AlbertP]

Did you run ./scripts/driver-select rt2x00 first?

You'll perhaps need to install build-essential and/or linux-headers from the repository / Software Manager.

[g-banjo]

Yes I did run that command.

Is it possible to do as you suggest without internet connectivity?

[g-banjo]

There is a Linux folder on the driver cd, I would have thought that would be the obvious place to get the relevant driver?

[AlbertP]

The CD on the driver is the vendor-provided driver which may be of lower quality. To compile that driver you also need linux-headers and probably build-essential too. You can connect to wired ethernet and then install the packages from Software Manager.

[g-banjo]

The computer is quite a distance from the modem - way too far for any cabling I've got - would it not be reasonable to at least try the drivers on the CD? If I could get connected using them then I could easily connect with the repositories for better ones?
The situation is that this is on a computer which is wired to a fair amount of studio equipment and I really don't want to move it just to get an ethernet connection. I don't really want internet on my DAW at all but I'm collaborating with musicians in other countries using dropbox so I need to get a way of down/uploading efficiently.
My feeling is this: I'd like to try the drivers on the CD, if they work I'll try imroved ones from the repositories, if they don't work I guess I may have to turn to Windows.

[AlbertP]

The driver on the CD is probably an archive file with README included. It probably works about the same way: opening a terminal after extracting it, then running make and sudo make install there.

[g-banjo]

Thanks for your patience, Albert.
No, that didn't work.
I have uploaded the README file to Dropbox, I dare say it would make a lot more sense to you than it does to me.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/61187100/README_STA_usb

[AlbertP]

Could you check in Synaptic Package Manager if linux-headers is installed at you?

[g-banjo]

Yes, linux-headers-generic