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The Adafruit HowTo is written against an rt73 WiFi dongle. They shipped me an RT2870 based dongle. Reading dmesg makes me think that all is OK:
[ 17.900000] Registered led device: rt2800usb-phy0::radio
[ 17.910000] Registered led device: rt2800usb-phy0::assoc
[ 17.920000] Registered led device: rt2800usb-phy0::quality
[ 17.940000] usbcore: registered new interface driver rt2800usb
[ 18.350000] rt2800usb 1-1.1:1.0: firmware: requesting rt2870.bin
And the devices shows up as wlan0 and produces iwconfig output. But... googling around the net made me suspicious that there is some driver conflicts. Some posts elsewhere lead me to believe that the 2870 does not work with the other 2x00 drivers, and requires it's own driver (rt2870.bin). This output from lsmod looks suspicious:
chumby-:/ # lsmod
Module Size Used by
ipv6 268800 11
stmp3xxx_rotdec 4440 0
stmp378x_devb_rotdec 1696 1 stmp3xxx_rotdec
chumby_timer 3508 0
i2c_dev 6500 2
rt2800usb 17888 0
rt2800lib 26624 1 rt2800usb
rt2x00usb 11264 2 rt2800usb,rt2800lib
rt2x00lib 30496 2 rt2800lib,rt2x00usb
led_class 4196 1 rt2x00lib
compat_firmware_class 9000 1 rt2x00lib
mac80211 179940 2 rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib
cfg80211 135408 2 rt2x00lib,mac80211
rfkill_backport 21108 1 cfg80211
compat 4416 2 mac80211,cfg80211
crc_ccitt 1984 1 rt2800usb
ehci_hcd 34160 0
usbcore 138432 5 rt2800usb,rt2x00usb,compat,ehci_hcd
mousedev 12136 0
joydev 10176 0
evdev 9700 0
stmp3xxx_ts 4932 0
i2c_stmp378x 4768 1
i2c_core 24080 2 i2c_dev,i2c_stmp378x
chumby_bend 5092 0
stmp3xxx_wdt 4528 1
I've seen where people on Ubuntu and Suse have been blacklisting the rx2x00 modules so that the rt2870 module loads. I'm not exactly sure that is the fix here, but it seems like it is worth a try. How do I blacklist a module in Chumy's linux? I don't see an /etc/modeprobe.d/ directory.
-dave