Many of you have found yourselves frustrated by the lack of Linux compliant cards for ExpressCard slots on newer notebooks. Many people tell you to just get a Linux compatible USB option, often times leading you to this mess. Obviously, every card claiming to use the rt2500/rt2570 chipset(s) while supposedly using the ralink2500usb driver. And in the past, this was your only recourse. Do not get me wrong, what those guys do is extremely important. But compiling is not how I like to spend my day and I think I speak for casual Linux users in this regard as well.

Well guess what, later tomorrow, I will be posting a fix for those of you screaming to get those rt2500usb based cards working. My fix worked with the Edimax EW-7318Ug and EW-7318USg each and every time - even with WPA2 Personal enabled.

So if you are using network-manager, make a note of which driver NM is trying to use. Because come the next post, I will give you a script to ‘automagically’ blacklist that driver and then kickstart the right one for you. Chances are, it is not rt2570 or rt2500usb. ;)

Complete how-to with scripts and video coming later, along with links to working Edimax USB devices as well. This is a Lockergnome exclusive - no one else is talking about this technique as it does not use network-manager. That and it is more detailed than simply blacklisting one driver only to modprobe another. The fix on the Launchpad page did not work for my two devices, but my solution did. Stay tuned, until tomorrow…

For PCMCIA wifi help, go here.

[tags]wireless, Linux, Intel[/tags]