Wireless networking, however, is a bit of a throwback to the old days. Half the hardware doesn’t have Linux drivers, and half of the devices that do require you to hunt for the driver — based on the chipset, of course, not on the name or model number on the box — and compile it yourself. (At least these days, you can sometimes run a tool to adapt the Windows drivers if there’s no native Linux option.)

The steps I actually needed to take to set up wifi on my Fedora 13 desktop probably only amounted to about 10 minutes. Unfortunately it took a lot of false starts to get there. I had installed a Zonet ZEW1642 PCI card, which my initial research suggested would be supported by the built-in rt2860 drivers. As it turned out, it wasn’t that simple.

First, what didn’t work:

• Built-in drivers.
• The rt2860 drivers (or any others) from RPMFusion.
• Manually configuring the card with system-config-network (even after I got the right driver installed).

What did work:

• Download the driver and firmware from Ralink’s Linux website.
• Build and install the driver.
• Start using NetworkManager.

Key Info

1. lspci reports the card as:Network controller: RaLink Device 3062
2. It doesn’t use the rt2860 driver.
3. When the driver works, the card will show up as ra0 when you run ifconfig or iwconfig. If you run either of those and don’t see ra0, or if you try to configure ra0 and get a message like “unknown device,” you don’t have the right driver loaded.
4. When the driver works, NetworkManager will automatically recognize it. You don’t need to configure the interface first. (This tripped me up several times.)
5. The NetworkManager and network services conflict with each other. You have to pick one and disable the other.

Most of the information I found on this card…wasn’t actually about this card, but about related ones. What little I did find implied that it uses the same driver as the rt2860. It doesn’t. Well, not exactly. They use the same firmware, and the config file for the rt3062 is called RT2860STA.dat, which confuses the issue.

Howto

1. Go to Ralink’s Linux page and download the appropriate driver and firmware based on the model number.
2. Unzip the firmware
3. As root, copy rt280.bin to /lib/firmware/rt2860.bin
4. Unzip the driver source file (ex: tar xvf /download/linux/drivers/2010_07_16_RT3062_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.0.tar)
5. Step into the folder and read the instructions in README_STA
   1. You probably won’t need to change the Makefile or set compiler flags, but you will need to set it to work with either NetworkManager or wpa_supplicant. So edit os/linux/config.mk and set HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y and HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y (for NetworkManager). If you don’t change this, it will not work. (Don’t worry about the next coulple of lines about wpa_supplicant. They don’t seem to be necessary from what I can tell.)
   2. Build it by typing make in the main folder of the source archive.
   3. As root, copy RT2860STA.dat to /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat
6. At this point, you can diverge from the directions a bit.
7. To install, switch to root and run make install in the main folder of the archive. This should copy rt3562sta.o to the appropriate location for your system.
8. If you haven’t been using NetworkManager, again as root, run service network stop to disable the standard network service (since it conflicts with NetworkManager).
9. Enable the driver: again as root, run modprobe rt3562sta
10. If you have NetworkManager running, it should immediately recognize the card and detect nearby networks.
11. Once you’ve got everything working, as root, run chkconfig --del network to permanently disable the other daemon. (But make a note of this in case you ever switch back.)

One more thing: keep this folder around! Because of the way Linux drivers work, you’ll need to re-install the drivers the next time your system updates to a new kernel. This is a pain, and is the reason I was hoping the built-in drivers or RPMFusion packages would work. More on that in the next section.

Follow-Through

Rebooting: Because I had previously removed NetworkManager from my system, I had to make sure the Gnome desktop would load the NM applet. That was fixed by going to System→Preferences→Startup Applications and enabling Network Manager.

Kernel Updates: I haven’t had to do this yet, but based on experience with other Red Hat-based systems where I’ve had to use third-party drivers, here’s how to reinstall the driver the next time Fedora sends you a kernel update.

After the new kernel is installed, but before you reboot, go back to the driver folder and run the following:

1. make clean
2. make
3. sudo make install (or just switch to root and run make install)
4. sudo modprobe rt3562sta (or stay as root and just run modprobe)

That should take care of it. If you forgot to do this first (and are reading this article on another computer), just run modprobe rt3562sta (as root) after you’re done.

Update: I originally suggested rebuilding the module before rebooting, but the Makefile automatically detects the running kernel. You can manually force it to use the source from the newer kernel, but for the sake of these directions, this way is simpler.

This 18-page thread at Fedora Forum was very informative, though it did point me in a few wrong directions.

Not that I actually need a netbook. I’d only really end up using it for conventions that I’d want to post live (which would probably boil down to Comic-Con International), and I have the ability to do that using either my G1 or the laptop.

Long-time readers (all five of you ) may remember that last year I agonized over upgrading my phone to something with real web capability until they announced wifi, and I just lugged the laptop around. Which worked fine, but it was heavy, especially the day I was also carrying around Comic Book Tattoo.

Of course, now I can use the G1 to post to my blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, or (almost) anywhere else even without wifi.

Except…

• Typing on that tiny keyboard is slow. Not as slow as the onscreen keyboard, but still a lot slower than typing on a full-sized keyboard. Then again, netbook keyboards are also smaller than standard, so it might not be much of an improvement.
• There’s no easy way to transfer photos from another camera. I can only think of two ways other than using a computer as an intermediary: use a Micro-SD card with adapter in the camera, or get a card reader that will clone data from an SD to a Micro-SD.

The camera issue shouldn’t bother me. Chances are I’d just end up doing what I did for WonderCon this year: post the occasional phone pic to Twitter and then upload the good photos to Flickr each evening. Just like I’d mostly be writing brief posts from the convention and detailed posts at the hotel.

But then I remember the post I made on the Tori Amos signing last year. After the signing I was so hyped that I found a table, set up the laptop, banged out a blog post, hooked up the camera and added a couple of photos…and the post ended up getting linked on a major Tori fansite, producing a traffic spike so big that not only is the following day still this blog’s busiest day ever, but that post, even though traffic fell off over time, is the 8th most-viewed post on the site over the past year.

Still, the promise of another 15 minutes of blogfame isn’t enough to justify several hundred bucks. (Though the < $200 models that pop up on Woot from time to time have been tempting.) So I’m making an effort to practice typing with the G1, both the physical and on-screen keyboards. I’ve got Twidroid and I Tweet for posting to two Twitter accounts. I’ve got wpToGo to simplify blogging. I’ve got a plugin that will automatically liveblog using Twitter, which I still need to test.

It’s just a matter of making full use of the tools I have, rather than running after the latest cool toy.

Update: I posted this last night, but somehow it ended up backdated to the day I started it on May 20. I think wpToGo must have set a publishing date when I posted the draft. Yes, I started this post on my phone.

Political geekery; saw a bumper sticker reading </bush>. Only prob: tag should be <president name="bush">. Did I mention geekery? #