Comment 12 for bug 762987

Well, I've spoken about testing the driver in my last post and I noticed that rt2800usb is making some trouble when using together with 2.6.38. The shutdown/reboot takes about a minute (with rt2870sta: only a few seconds on my machine) and sometimes you have to unplug+replug the stick to get it work. Also the NetworkManager isn't always responding on my commands, if I disable the network, the network gets disabled but the icon in the panel still says that I am connected.

I upgraded to kernel 2.6.39 via the Kernel Mainline PPA and the problems are not occuring there. Maybe the new firmware isn't compatible with the module in 2.6.38. I also wanted to test 3.0-rc1 but the system crashes after login, I read some programs doing version checks have to be modified to work with the 3.x kernel, so we have to wait a bit.

> What remains to be considered is how to fix this for everyone in natty
> (and possibly users of linux-backports-modules-compat-wireless in
> maverick and lucid). From what I see a SRU (stable release update)
> should be considered for linux-firmware, replacing the rt2870bin (md5:
> e4b60f5bb4980a26cbac32be690451d6) with the /lib/firmware/rt2870.bin
> (md5: 36c944c3138125605d28c0a3a1338be9) from linux-firmware 1.53 which
> is already in oneiric.

That would be great, but it has to be made sure that the new firmware is working with kernel 2.6.38, as described above.

In look back, Linux has made a good progress in hardware support. Some years ago I tried to use Linux with wifi and nothing worked (or just unencrypted connections were supported), today it's much more stress-free.