Sunday, May 20, 2018

drivers - Ralink RT3290 WiFi card not working on Ubuntu 16.04


I recently installed Ubuntu 16.04 on a computer with a Ralink RT3290 wireless network card. After working fine for a day, the card just stopped working. Apparently, the card is no longer supported in Linux so the only official drivers available are very old.


I have tried following the answers to this question,
this question and this question - even tried getting modified drivers from one of the commenters to get the driver to compile on the newer kernels (4.4.0 here). None of it worked.


dmesg reveals the following:


rt2800_wait_wpdma_ready: Error - WPDMA TX/RX busy [0x00000068]
rt2800_wait_wpdma_ready: Error - WPDMA TX/RX busy [0x00000068]
rt2800pci_set_device_state: Error - Device failed to enter state 4 (-5)

The card shows up when I do lspci:


Network controller: Ralink corp. RT3290 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe

However, entering lshw -C network shows that the network is "DISABLED". rfkill list shows that the card is neither hard nor soft blocked.



Found the answer after two days, posting it here for others to find. This modified driver for Ubuntu 15.04 fixed the problem for me. Many thanks to the author! Those of you who, like me, are new to Linux, will appreciate how easy it is to install them.


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