Last time I wrote about getting my Zyxel NWD 210N WLAN USB stick to run I had to fall back to ndiswrapper which uses the windows drivers from zyxel and somehow magically gets them to run under linux.

Well, this was with Linux kernel 2.6.25 while 2.6.29 is in the making now. Time to give it a second try, this time with native Linux drivers from the kernel. The output from lsusb -v suggested that the chipset inside is made by Ralink (USB ID 0586:3416). Some Ubuntu hardware list gave me the missing hint to find the right driver: Inside the Zyxel NWD210N there is a Ralink 2870 USB chipset. Ralink provides native drivers and firmware on their homepage.

The kernel hackers have a native kernel driver in the making for this chipset which is marked as a staging driver. Worth giving it a try ;)
Step 1: Get 2.6.29-rc2-git1 (emerge -av >=sys-kernel/git-sources-2.6.29_rc2-r1)
Step 2: Get RT2870STA.dat from Ralink’s Linux drivers and put it to /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/RT2870STA.dat

Step 3: Copy over old .config and configure the kernel to include the staging driver

Device Drivers —> [*] Staging drivers —>
[M] Ralink 2870 wireless support


Step 4: make && make modules_install and setup the kernel to boot

After a reboot with this brand new kernel and modules everything is ready to plug in the device.

The LED on the thingy instantly started flashing and the dmesg output says:

usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
usb 1-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
rt2870sta: module is from the staging directory, the quality is unknown, you have been warned.
rtusb init —>


After a few moments and some dmesg spam a new network interface (ra0) appeared and KNetworkManager showed the WLAN networks around over this second interface. :)

I have yet to test how stable the driver and the connections are, but this post you are currently reading was published over the new rt2870sta driver :)