Install Serial Monkey Drivers for RT2x00 Wireless cards in openSUSE 10.3 & 11

The rt2xxxpci drivers that comes with openSUSE 10.3 and openSUSE 11.0 works OK but there has been lot of users having performance and connectivity issues using this driver. The Serial Monkey rt2x00 drivers should overcome these issues.

The procedure to install the driver includes building te Kernel module.

Install Kernel Source GCC and make utility

SAIBABA:~ # yast2  –install kernel-source gcc make

Prepare Kernel to build the Kernel-Module

Switch user to root and run the following commands:

SAIBABA:~ # cd /usr/src/linux

SAIBABA:~ # make mrproper

SAIBABA:~ # make cloneconfig

SAIBABA:~ # make modules_prepare

Download the latest Driver

Download the appropriate Daily CVS driver for your chipset from here

For instance for rt2500

SAIBABA:~ # wget http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/rt2500-cvs-daily.tar.gz

Unzip and Untar the driver

SAIBABA:~ # tar -zxvf rt2500-cvs-daily.tar.gz

Unload the SUSE Kernel Module

Unload the current Kernel module rt2500pci

SAIBABA:~ # rmmod rt2500pci

Compile and install New drivers

Change Directory to the newlys extracted driver folder and compile and install the drivers as follows:

SAIBABA:~ # cd rt2500-cvs-daily

SAIBABA:/root/rt2500-cvs-daily # make && make install

Probe to load the newly installed modules

SAIBABA:/root/rt2500-cvs-daily # modprobe rt2500

Now, start YAST – Network Devices – Network Settings – Overview and select the Wireless card then EDIT and click Hardware tab, select rt2500 under module.

You can now configure your Wireless network connections and all should work great!!!