Not that impressive and from reading the reviews, it might be a cheap plastic piece of crap. I thought that mine was. I couldn’t get it to work under Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I don’t have any personal windows machines any more that aren’t virtual.
Anyway, I thought the thing was broken. Finally I had a look in dmesg and found something similar to this over here:
[ 8566.396539] rtusb init --->
[ 8566.396547] Error: Driver 'rt2870' is already registered, aborting...
Um. Yeah. So then I found another post over at the Ubuntu forums about this sort of thing confirming the need to blacklist modules.
This seems really whack, but maybe this helps other usb dongle cards work more stably or something. Anyway, sucks that a really nice, inexpensive dongle doesn’t work out of the box in the latest Ubuntu, seemingly the most popular desktop flavor of Linux. Ah well.
Anyway, go to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add the following:
blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2870sta
You might not need the second line, but I added it and mine works. Woot.
When I confirm some wireless N speeds, I will review the dongle on Newegg and link here.
As an aside, I think that Newegg and Rosewill would sell a lot more of these if they
- advertised how to get it working
- included an extension cable
This fix worked perfectly until I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linux.
After the upgrade my Rosewill adapter stopped working again.
I deleted the following entry from /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:
blacklist rt2870sta
Now my adapter is functional again.
Me too! I just upgraded a little while back and plugged in my adapter today. Thanks!