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 :)

Wer nicht im 5. Semester Informatik ist, kann diesen Artikel ignorieren ;)

Allen anderen sei mitgeteilt, dass sich das Buch “Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy” (Shapiro, Varian) sehr gut als S-Bahn-Lektüre eignet. Ich hätte es selbst schon lange mal lesen sollen, tue es aber erst jetzt im Zuge der Vorbereitung auf Information Rules 1 im nächsten Semester (Pflicht im 6. Semester für Informatiker). Warum jetzt schon lesen, wenn es erst im nächsten Semester dran kommt?

1. Weil’s echt einfach und entspannt zu lesen ist (nix Mathematik).
2. Weil’s jetzt noch in der TU Bibliothek zu bekommen ist.
3. Weil man über die Feiertage hoffentlich ein bischen Zeit zum lesen hat.
4. Weil man diese Zeit im nächsten Semester vermutlich nicht hat und es dann eh schon zu spät ist (dauert eben doch ein bischen eh man durch ist).

Ich vermute zwar, dass Quasi niemand den es betrifft das hier liest, aber naja … die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt.

… Just tought my girlfriend how to play chess (while she suggested strip-chess, how great is that? ;) ). I’m currently sitting in the living room in the dark, listening to the Xmas channel on sky.fm really loud and running an emerge --depclean on my laptop.

While we are at it — I just put together some (incomplete) freevo playlists for the free webstreams from Digitally Import and sky.fm. They are only 96kbit/s MP3 but sound reasonably well. So for everyone who also has a freevo box in his living room, here are the lists:

• di.fm.fxd — di.fm — mostly electronic/techno stuff
• sky.dm.fxd — sky.fm — everything else (oldies, classics, pop, rock, etc.)
• other.fxd — oemradio.org, dub-beautiful.org, LOHRO, Radio1

Looks like I’ve got another lecture to read. In our (we = Computers and Society Departement) course “Information Rules 1″ which will take place next semester, I allready have the “Lex Informatica” lecture. In this lesson we teach our students the basics of the theory of regulation (Lessig, Reidenberg). I allready have this lesson pretty stable, it just needs a roundup to make some points more clear. But now I additionally have the “Open Source” lesson. This means alot of reading for me. I think I’ll start with some articles from our Open Source Yearbook and then dive into the papers from all the famous and not so famous scientists. This is both challenging and exciting for me but also means some work, obviously. Well, no more boredom in cold winter days. ;)

It’s been quite some time we shared. You teached me so much about my imagination, about good and bad. You have probably been one reason why I am now where I am, studying computer science and beeing the person I am. But only now I have seen the last episode (of 7 seasons, each about 25 episodes) and I’ll definitely miss it.

Well, for all of you who didn’t know yet: I’m a StarTrek TNG fan. It must have had something todo with the time in which the TNG series was produced — following the stories and characters was an inspiring experience. Nearly every episode is full of explorations of the human soul, tries to show the heights and depths of us and how we can decide where to go. I guess, much of that comes from Patrick Steward who plays an intellectual, culturally rich and yet strong Jean Luc Picard and alot of that is not just roleplay, I bet.

I have to admit, in my youth StarTrek characters were my role models. The ideals of which TNG is full of are pure and rich and I feel lucky to be influenced by them (don’t get me started on comparing them to new “science fiction” series like StarGate or something like that).

So, I just want to say thank you to all the writers, actors and visionaries who produced Star Trek - The Next Generation.

The old Joomla+RSS solution now seems inadequate to me. So I’m looking into mojoBlog, a native blog component for Joomla with all the fancy features a real blog is supposed to have. Well, let’s see, maybe something else will replace it later but it seems to be the best non-commercial blogging sollution for Joomla.