After upgrading my Asus Eee PC 901 to Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 I was shocked to find that the wireless card stopped working. Problems included:
- Failing to detect wireless networks
- Random cutouts after connection
- Unstable file transfer
- Very slow download speed (at one point 500 B/sec)
This problem affects all Eee PC models with a rt2860sta wireless card; it is also likely that similar RaLink models are affected, for instance the Eee PC 1000HE among others.
Information about networking capabilities can be found using lspci | grep RaLink* and lsmod | grep rt*.
A working solution
Install the package linux-backports-modules-wireless-maverick-generic using Aptitude. Then run this bash code:
echo "
blacklist rt2800lib
blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2x00usb
" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
This removes the faulty Linux kernel modules and restores wireless connection functionality. According to the forum post below, problems with WEP networks can be solved by adding rt2x00lib and rt2x00pci back in. Look at these sources if you want more information.
Useful sources
- Ubuntu 10.10 on EEE901: Wifi problems fixed here: this single forum post solved all my problems, after a few hours of searching without success
- Arch Linux documentation on Asus Eee PC 901
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