Rt61

This is a mini-howto to have a Linksys WMP54G with the RaLink chipset and the rt61 driver working under Gentoo Linux. To do this I will be using the net-wireless/ralink-rt61 driver with the 2.6.21 kernel.

Subpages

• Installation on a AMD64-based Gentoo installation

Kernel

Firstly, compile wireless LAN (non hamradio) support for your kernel. See Wireless/Configuration for more information.

Installing ralink-rt61

Install the rt61 driver using

emerge -av ralink-rt61

Then load the rt61 module

modprobe rt61
update-modules

The module should then appear

lsmod

In order to have the module automatically loaded at boot

echo "rt61" >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

And create net.ra0

ln -s /etc/init.d/net.lo /etc/init.d/net.ra0

Now the interface ra0 should appear in ifconfig.

ifconfig -a

If this is so, then so far, so good.

Configuration for WPA

Firstly, emerge wpa_supplicant

emerge -av wpa_supplicant

To configure for use with WPA encryption we need to edit /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/rt61sta.dat.

nano -w /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/rt61sta.dat

For this example I will be using WPA-PSK and TKIP.

...
SSID=YourWirelessSSID
NetworkType=Infra
Channel=0
AuthMode=WPAPSK
EncrypType=TKIP
...
WPAPSK=YourSecreteCodeHere
...

And that's that. Having specified nothing in /etc/conf.d/net in the way of IP addresses, DHCP should be assumed.

To test whether the configuration works, if necessary firstly stop your wired connection.

/etc/init.d/net.eth0 stop

And attempt to start the wireless interface

/etc/init.d/net.ra0 start

If at this stage an IP address is gathered by DHCP, then you're good to go.

You can then add ra0 to automatically start on boot

rc-update add net.ra0 default