Ubuntu
gnome-nettool package

rt2860sta driver giving kernel panic

Asked by Daniel Carr

I have a WMP600N wireless card in my desktop computer. After installing Ubuntu 12.04, my wireless connection would stop working every so often. After much searching online, I found this tutorial telling me to remove the rt2800 driver and install the rt2860sta driver.

http://chernan1014.wordpress.com/2012/06/15/linksys-wmp600n-fix-for-ubuntu-12-04/

That worked great, until I messed something else up and had to reformat from scratch.

I went to follow those same steps again, and now when I enable the new 2860sta driver, after 30-45 seconds I get a kernel panic.

I tried reformatting again and I still get the kernel panic. I still can't figure out why I had it working at one point and now it won't work. I looked around on forums some more and tried removing power management, but that did not help.

I'm not terribly familiar with Linux troubleshooting commands so I don't even know where to go from here. I don't know how to read kernel fault printouts or logs.

Does anyone know what is going on? If not, what information would you need to be able to help me out? Thanks.

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Ubfan
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Ubfan (ubfan1) said : 		#1

Unfortunately, I have hear such disconnect issues with both drivers. A friend found that wicd reconnected much faster than network manager, so he switched (he was using the rt2860sta driver on 10.04). Your kernel panic is probably a result of not blacklisting one of the drivers -- check the files in /etc/modprobe.d for the lines:
blacklist rt2860sta
or
blacklist rt2800pci
One and only one should be found.
The rt2860sta driver is still supplied in the staging area of 12.04, so there is no need to build the driver yourself, but it's config file is not present in /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA /rt2860sta.DAT (not sure of the caps anymore), so I don't know how it even works. When you download the source, you get the initial file, which you should edit and insert some entries like country code,...
 I have total success with the rt2800pci driver, but never experienced any problems with the rt2860sta driver either on my MSI netbook.

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Daniel Carr (dcarr) said : 		#2

Thank you for your quick and helpful response. I appreciate you responding to my question.

Well I tried blacklisting the rt2800pci driver and when I enabled the rt2860sta driver it still caused a kernel panic. So at this point in time I have rt2860sta blacklisted and I'm still having connection issues.

I next tried to install wicd to handle the wireless configuration but I get the same results for each driver. With the rt2800pci it randomly loses internet and I have to manually reconnect to get internet back and with the rt2860sta I get a kernel panic.

Also regarding the disconnecting, it seems that once it happens it stays that way until the computer goes to sleep or until I manually disconnect. One other strange thing that I'm observing. When I'm streaming anything on my Windows laptop (music, video, commercials) and I try to download anything with my Ubuntu machine, it interrupts the stream. Then after the disconnection happens (which it only does when it's being actively used) my stream will come active again. It's as if the wireless on my Ubuntu machine is interfering with the wireless on my laptop. I realize that this could be unrelated, but I'm hoping that once I fix my issues with the wireless card on the desktop that this will go away too.

Just figured I'd add it in as information in case it means something important.

Thanks again.

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Best Ubfan (ubfan1) said : 		#3

Sounds like you have interference, too many devices all on the same
wireless channel. In a terminal type:
iwconfig
and take a look at the last few lines of wlan0 (or whatever your wireless
is) for the invalids and retries. Anything other than 0 shows
interference. For outside interference, type:
sudo iwlist scan
and look at all the other stations -- particularly the ones on channels the
same as yours or nearby. Look at the quality and signal strengths -- you
might want to move the channel you are using to a more unused spot. Really
only channels 1, 6, and 11 do not overlap to some degree.

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Daniel Carr (dcarr) said : 		#4

While I did not get my original question answered, it is true that my computer does work with the rt2800pci driver just fine. I changed our wireless router to only use 20mhz and use channel 6, and now the Ubuntu machine will not lose internet connectivity no matter what the windows machine is doing. The windows computer simply has trouble while the Ubuntu machine is downloading something.

I will be investigating this issue, but as it's not a Ubuntu issue I'll be setting this as "Problem Solved."

Thanks Ubfan!

Revision history for this message
Daniel Carr (dcarr) said : 		#5

Thanks Ubfan, that solved my question.