Strange wireless problem Mint 15 (still not solved)

[Overnumerousness]

This is not a new problem, but usually when Mint does this and I restart my computer the problem corrects itself. I am running a mint Windows 7 dual boot. Earlier today, our internet was cut off because my idiot *ahem* lovely room mate forgot to pay the bill. Anyways, he took care of it and the internet is up and running again... for Windows. Mint continues to pop up a gray box that says "authentication required by Wi-Fi network and has a field for me to type in my password.. The same box that popped up the first time I connected to my wireless router. The problem is, that no matter how many times I enter my password, Mint thinks for a moment and then the box pops up again. It never successfully connects to the network, and I can not use the internet. The box just pops up over and over again.

Mint has done exactly the same thing every time my internet connection has been interrupted for any reason. The problem is that until now, whenever I had restarted my computer, Mint had worked again. Now it doesn't.

[Overnumerousness]

An update, I have been able to very infrequently restore my internet connection. When Mint opens and immediately displays that it has connected to my router, the internet works. Whenever Linux takes a moment to connect it inevitably asks me for a password and doesn't work. There isn't any rhyme or reason that I can discover. It works maybe once or twice out of every ten times I boot into Mint. The rest of the time, it doesn't.


Please respond if you have any ideas. I really need to fix this problem.

[TBABill]

When you do connect, does it perform normally? Any disconnects or other random issues? I'm wondering if you have the wrong driver activated, or possibly your system is trying to activate two drivers for the same device or something equally as odd.

When you have it working can you post the output of

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lsmod

And we need

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lspci -Vnn

to determine your wireless device.

[Overnumerousness]

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[Overnumerousness]

Just in case this additional information makes a difference, I do usually connect from behind a vpn. I don't connect to it until I am already connected to the internet, and there are no procecies related to it running when i first boot into linux that I can see. It does disable internet access when it disconects though.

I don't think that could be the problem though. I am not sure why my computer would randomly decide to connect days later, and it seems as though it can't connect to my router, rather than to the internet.

[TBABill]

Hmmmm...must have been the capital V that threw off the lspci. Probably should be lowercase. Apologies for that. Looking at the RT2800 issue now. It used to be problematic with how the system configured it and needed to blacklist some of the drivers, but not sure these days. Will post back if I find out.

[Overnumerousness]

Thanks. Can you clarify your post a bit though? What do you think the problem is? Also, is there anything I can do to fix it. For example, might I try re-installing Mint? It isn't really feasable for me not to have internet.

[TBABill]

I think you may be using the rt2800 driver but may be better off using a different one, such as the rt2860sta, for example. I'm not sure though and it depends on which device you have. The LSPCI (lowercase) output will tell us what that device is.

[Overnumerousness]

At the moment, I do not have internet access on Mint. When it returns, if I post that output, can you guide me through installing the new driver?

Thanks!

[TBABill]

I may be able to but I won't be up much longer today. The way to know what wireless device you have is

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lspci | grep -i Wireless

My concern is whether you have the correct driver active and that it's the only one. I just looked mine up and mine says

04:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT2790 Wireless 802.11n 1T/2R PCIe

Mine uses the same drivers your system has active right now (RT2800pci) and is working well so we'll see how yours comes out when you're able.

[Overnumerousness]

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[TBABill]

http://askubuntu.com/questions/303415/ubuntu-13-04-ralink-rt5390-wont-work-after-upgrade

That link has a response to the problem with a list of steps to take to fix it. Basically what you're doing is installing the RT5390sta driver and then blacklisting (disabling) the RT2800 and all the RT2x00 driver modules. If that works, it suggests Ubuntu/Mint setup the driver incorrectly for that wireless device so if you use any Ubuntu or derivative distro you may need to follow those steps each time you switch to another distro. Non-Ubuntu based distros may not have that problem, but since drivers are in the kernel it's possible they may as well.

I'm curious if PCLinuxOS would do the same because it's generally good at getting wireless right even when other distros fail, and theirs happens pretty much automatically from my past experience, even with proprietary drivers such as Broadcom.

[Overnumerousness]

Very much appreciated!

Before I do this, is there a way to save the state of my OS so I can undo the changes that I made? If not, are there directions to undo the changes that I made in case this doesn't work out?

[tomchart]

I'm dealing with the same issue, although in my case the card is a Ralink 539b.
I believe I've successfully installed the Ralink driver, and it seems to have fixed the issue, although I haven't run it enough to be sure its stable.
I used the instructions from the above link (more details at [url]http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2138302[/url])

Additional steps I took (and I'm not sure which of these steps were necessary, but without all these tweaks I originally got nothing):
-ran depmod -a
-added rt3290sta to /etc/modules
-ran update-initramfs -u
-(specific to the 539b) following [url]http://irrelevantcheetah.com/?tag=rt539b[/url], I added lines to the code (before installation) for 539B duplicating those for the other model numbers

One issue I've noticed already is this error in the log, although I haven't seen any consequences:

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GetDesiredTssiAndCurrentTssi: BBP TSSI INFO is not ready. (BbpR47 = 0x94)
RT5390_AsicTxAlcGetAutoAgcOffset: Incorrect desired TSSI or current TSSI

[Overnumerousness]

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[tomchart]

It's not finding the patch file - make sure its in ~/Downloads/2011_1007_RT5390_RT5392_Linux_STA_V2.5.0.3_DPO/, and try running the patch just as you did.

[Overnumerousness]

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[Brendon77]

hi Overnumerousness!
You should use BCM 4313 driver (version 5.100.82.38).