First of all I would like to say that I'm really new to VL. Today, I had my first VL experience with a VectorLinux Standard 5.8 LIVE Edition CD on a Sony Vaio laptop, and I'm trying to connect it to my WLAN.
My WiFi antenna is the Hama 00062764 (USB). "lsusb" and Google told me this device is using a Ratech chip (
http://www.gerwesselink.nl/wlanadapter.txt). According to this document I need the "rt73" driver.
I googled some more and found the following page, where Ratech is apparently offering the driver and firmware for my device:
http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Linux.html .
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads#rt73_.28USB.29 is probably something similar but from an unofficial source(?).
I stumbled upon a discussion at
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=22260 where someone was trying to install the same device on a different system. , so I downloaded
http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/RT73_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.4.0.tar.gz and tried to do what he did:
1) downloading the driver
2) unpacking the driver
3) cd to the Module directory
4) make; make install
5) modprobe rt73
Well, step 4) didn't work, and again I asked Google for help, where I learned that "make" and "make install" do not exist on VL and I should better use "cleaninstall" instead (source:
http://www.home.no/mlinux/built.txt).
In the afore mentioned discussion someone claimed that one had to copy the firmware to /lib/firmware, so I downloaded
http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/RT71W_Firmware_V1.8.zip (which, despite its name, does contain a file "rt73.bin") and extracted it to /lib/firmware. I ran cleaninstall again but to no avail.
"modprobe rt73" still says "rt73 does not exist" and iwconfig says "no wireless extensions" twice.
I don't really know what I'm doing wrong here (which is probably the bigger problem than what I'm actually doing wrong). I'm happy to see that VL does detect the device, and as I understand it the Ratech chip is of those more likely to work with Linux, but think I'm doing something fundamentally wrong with the drivers and/or the firmware and I just don't know what. Any help is appreciated.
Oh, and I tried to provide all relevant information. Please tell me if I forgot anything. Thanks.