RT2800USB wifi dongle not working.

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12 Dec 2020 00:27 #191700 by dloranger
Hi, new to the forum so apologies is this is the wrong location for this thread.

I just grabbed the latest version and installed it on a dell optiplex 740 tower I have been using for a long time. I am trying to get wifi going on this beast and have had exactly 0 success. I was running linuxCNC 2.7 until yesterday, again with no wifi. I have a RT2800USB dongle which works perfectly everywhere else, but I can't seem to get it to work on this tower. I have to run about 100ft of cable through the house to get hardline, so definitely not an acceptable option long term.

I have added the non-free repository and it seems like everything is loaded properly, but the dongle wont see any wireless networks to connect to.

I am not a linux user outside of the RPI which is limited, but I am not afraid of the console interface.

I have tried for several days between the two installs but no success with anything I can find online. I am almost to the point of setting up an rpi just to act as a wifi to lan bridge, but clearly that is not the best solution.

can someone help me to get this dongle working properly? Let me know where to start and I am happy to follow along and experiment, but I am out of my element so I am not sure what to ask.

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12 Dec 2020 02:12 #191702 by BeagleBrainz
This should be of some help, wiki.debian.org/rt2800usb ,mentions Jessie & Stretch but you should be able to extrapolate to Buster.

You can try "RT2800USB Debian" as a search term in google.

First thing you really want to do is open a terminal plug in your dongle and run dmesg and look for any references to the wifi dongle. That should let you know if at least it's being seen by the system.

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12 Dec 2020 02:50 #191704 by dloranger
/etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
first two are defaults, last one is added from the guide, all that seems to be fine from what I can tell

dmesg
[ 9361.155974] usb 1-8: USB disconnect, device number 5
[ 9363.762025] usb 1-8: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
[ 9363.935550] usb 1-8: New USB device found, idVendor=148f, idProduct=5370, bcdDevice= 1.01
[ 9363.935555] usb 1-8: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 9363.935557] usb 1-8: Product: 802.11 n WLAN
[ 9363.935558] usb 1-8: Manufacturer: Ralink
[ 9363.935559] usb 1-8: SerialNumber: 1.0
[ 9364.070103] usb 1-8: reset high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
[ 9364.236661] ieee80211 phy2: rt2x00_set_rt: Info - RT chipset 5390, rev 0502 detected
[ 9364.266285] ieee80211 phy2: rt2x00_set_rf: Info - RF chipset 5370 detected
[ 9364.267499] ieee80211 phy2: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel_ht'

lsmod
...
rt2800usb              32768  0
rt2x00usb              24576  1 rt2800usb
rt2800lib             118784  1 rt2800usb
rt2x00lib              61440  3 rt2800usb,rt2x00usb,rt2800lib
mac80211              868352  3 rt2x00lib,rt2x00usb,rt2800lib
snd_hda_intel          49152  1
cfg80211              802816  2 rt2x00lib,mac80211
...

ifconfig
wlan0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether 1c:bf:ce:84:94:da  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

so it seems like everything is being detected and loading, but I still get no networks found when I try to look for networks using the wicd utility, its like the radio is not enabled.

May of the links I have been following suggest to use misc commands such as lsusb, iwlist,lshw, etc, but those commands don't appear to be available in this build, or I don't have permissions to use them.?

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12 Dec 2020 04:20 #191705 by BeagleBrainz
Have you installed the firmware package as suggested ?

What error are you getting when you try to run the suggested commands ?

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12 Dec 2020 04:36 #191708 by dloranger
All commands ran successfully, nothing gives any errors, just the wicd says no networks found when I scan for networks with the UI

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12 Dec 2020 04:47 #191709 by BeagleBrainz

May of the links I have been following suggest to use misc commands such as lsusb, iwlist,lshw, etc, but those commands don't appear to be available in this build, or I don't have permissions to use them.?


What errors do you get when you try the above suggested commands ?

Did you install the firmware package ?

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12 Dec 2020 04:56 #191710 by dloranger
I did install the packages per the instructions on the wiki unless there is something more I don't know about. Ran all commands on the wiki 2x just to be sure. I tried to load the usbutils package using apt but got some incompatibility error so it bailed out. I can get the exact error if you need it, just not by the machine at the moment.

All the commands such as lsusb, iwlist, etc return "command not found".

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12 Dec 2020 05:15 #191711 by BeagleBrainz
try
rfkill
and see if anything is blocked.

If that isn't there you will have to install the packaged called rfkill

You may have to install the wireless-tools package as well if it's not there.

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