[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[David Braley]

Hello group,

Well, I have struggled with this for about 6 hours now, and I am looking
for some help from this group if possible.

Background: I am a sort-of Linux newbie. I have been a SuSE user since
1999 (a Slackware user since 1996) and have been real happy with the
distro. I have dabbled in a ton of other flavors of Linux, only to find
myself coming back to SuSE because it just works! (for me anyway). But,
since Novel has decided to shift focus and reinvent themselves as
NovelSoft, I have decided to jump ship and give Fedora 6 a try. So far
so good with some generous help from Sean (Thanks Sean!) with some
little irritating problems.

Now I am having a real show stopper of a problem I would like to expose
to the group. My problem is with my RaLink rt2500 wireless card. The
card has pretty good support in Linux and I have been able to easily get
it to work in SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Arch, and Ubuntu. But for the life
of me, I can not get it to work in Fedora 6, well sort of work.

Online docs are OK I guess, but with careful reading and following
others success with getting this card to work has been unsuccessful for
me. I feel the problem is in the driver. This is what I know:

When I boot into the system to a prompt (no X), I can log into the
system, and run a command "ifup ra0" (ra0 is the interface for the
wireless card) and everything works. I can use Lynx to access sites like
Slashdot and google with no problem. Based on this, I feel I have gotten
the driver (module?) loaded correctly on the system. The process
involves downloading the latest source, compiling it, and installing it.
A few system config files need to be edited by hand, but nothing that hard.

But, as soon as I start X, a process I can view in "top" with a command
called "events/0" takes over using 99.8 percent of the cpu, basically
rendering the system unusable. I can use "cnt-alt-backspace" to kill X
to get back to a non-X runlevel, and then if I run "ifdown ra0" to shut
down the wireless card, everything goes back to normal and the system is
fine. Now, this problem only happens when I am in a window manager (KDE
in my case), not when I am in a non-X runlevel. Also, once I start X,
just killing X does not stop the runaway process. I need to bring down
the ra0 interface to stop the problem. I can start and stop ra0 in a non
X environment with no problems.

I suspect X is somehow conflicting with the rt2500 module (driver?)
causing some process (command?) called "events/0" to run away with the
system.

I hope I have given enough information.

Take care.

David