[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Bill Thorson]

David,

I have a laptop with FC5 and the rt2500 wireless device.  I do checkout 
the cvs tree and build the driver but have not experienced what you 
are.  I do not use ifup but use the gnome network management interface.  
I also built and use the Ralink supplied utility.  It's really great for 
scanning and attaching to found networks.  I think the interrupt thought 
have merit because I've never experienced any real problems with this 
device under FC4 and FC5.

Bill

David Braley wrote
> 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
>
>
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