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Welcome to the rt2x00 Project
This project is a development effort to provide free, stable and feature rich Linux drivers for wireless 802.11b/g/i cards based on the following Ralink chipsets: rt2400, rt2500, rt2570, rt61 and rt73.
Our drivers come in two flavors: enhanced Ralink legacy drivers and next-generation rt2x00 drivers (which will get included in future kernel releases).
They provide all the features you could expect, such as encryption, traffic monitoring, frame injection and more. Legacy drivers however do not support HostAP nor wpa_supplicant, and some of them are not stable on SMP systems yet.
Please feel free to browse the history of the project, where we want to go in the future or just jump on in and grab the latest version of the source available from the downloads page.
If you are having problems with this driver then perhaps you should wander over and view the FAQ, or perhaps the HOWTOS. If your still stumped then roll over to the forums or mailing lists and post a question to the community.
For more detail see our history page and our roadmap page.
LICENSE information:
The driver code we make available here is released under the GPL. However, some drivers require firmware to be loaded to the device. This firmware is redistributable but not modifiable, since it has a specific Firmware_license.
News
rt2x00 featured @ linux.com - May 2008
Hi All,
Last April, linux.com has made an article about our project, here's the link: http://www.linux.com/feature/132701
Luis Correia
rt2x00 Project Administrator
rt2x00 enters mainline kernel - January 2008
Hi All,
two days ago, January 24th, Linux Kernel 2.6.24 was released. This is the first mainline kernel that includes (sadly a somewhat buggy) rt2x00 release.
Our rt2x00 driver has reached a broader audience, and we all wish to congratulate the developers and most importantly all of our users who provided numerous bug reports and even fixes.
Now, lets continue to work towards a stabler driver!
Luis Correia
rt2x00 Project Administrator
Developers meeting log - October 7 2007
Hi All,
We're doing a developer's meeting to further refine our goals, focusing on improving the driver as well as other issues.
Here's the Meetings link to it.
Luis Correia
rt2x00 Project Administrator
Announcement from the rt2x00 project administrators - September 17 2007
Hi All,
Update on the announcement from May 18, all developers are back in action since some time now. Luis is for the moment still the main contact person for all administration and support request.
Ivo van Doorn
rt2x00 Project Administrator
Announcement from the rt2x00 project administrators - May 18 2007
Hi all,
Here follows an important announcement that affects not only the user of the rt2x00 & legacy drivers, but also the developers team, and the distributions shipping the drivers.
Mark has been project administrator since the beginning of this project, and I have been working on rt2x00 since almost the beginning of the project.
After some discussions within the developers team, both Mark and I have decided it is the best for both of us is to take a break from our current roles in the project. (This is not only because of project related issues, but also private life issues). The break that will be taken will be approximately 3 months.
Mark has been the main administrator of this project, and to reduce the load for him it is requested that he will not be contacted for project related issues. Mark will be instead focusing behind-the-scenes on getting up to scratch with the rt2x00 driver such that he can be a more useful development resource moving forward. For all administrative/project related issues during Mark's absense Luis should be contacted instead as he will be the primary project administrator.
Because at this time there are no developers with enough experience to assume maintainership of rt2x00, I will continue that role during my break. Note that this will only be maintainership and not development. I will check, apply and provide feedback for patches that are emailed to me (using the email rules that are explained in the rt2x00 GIT instructions). Important patches will be send by me upstream towards wireless-dev. Support of rt2x00 will also be limited to the willingness of other developers to provide assistance to the users of rt2x00. Other than that there will be none or very limited support from me.
So just to summarize:
- Mark should not be contacted for project related issues/questions.
He will not be active on the forums or the general mailing lists
- Luis will be the main project administrator during Mark's absense.
- I will be assisting Luis as project administrator.
- My work on rt2x00 will be halted, I will merely check and apply
patches for rt2x00 to git.
- rt2x00 support request will either not be handled at all, or
handled by another developer who has time and who is willing to
handle the support.
The aim here is the "recharge" such that after this break period we can hit rt2x00 development hard and finish the work required to have it accepted into the official kernel tree.
Ivo van Doorn
rt2x00 Project Administrator
New Legacy rt61 driver released - 1 May 2007
Hi everyone,
Second BETA release of a rt61 legacy driver. Please see the changelog for a full list of changes. rt2x00 development is still coming along, so hopefully this resolves some more user issues in the mean time.
Any problems, please post in the forums.
In the news: LinuxMagazine and Donations - 22 December 2006
Hi everyone,
Armijn Hemel, a writer for the Dutch LinuxMagazine has written an article about wireless network device support under Linux.
He was so kind to offer us to contact some hardware manufacturers about the donations of testing hardware for our team. And it wasn't that long before the results came in, most hardware manufacturers agreed to donate some hardware, and Conceptronic even has donated 15 (!) wireless devices to our project.
The full result of the donations are:
Conceptronic has donated:
-
5x rt2561 pci
5x rt5261 pcmcia
5x rt2573 usb
Edimax has donated:
-
1x rt2571 usb
1x rt2561 pcmcia
1x rt2561 pci
Sitecom has donated:
-
1x rt2661 (MIMO) pci
1x t2571 usb
D-Link has donated:
-
1x 2561 pcmcia
We would like to thank Conceptronic, Edimax, Sitecom and D-Link for their donations to our project. A special thanks goes to LinuxMagazine and Armijn Hemel for making these donations possible.
Regards, Ivo van Doorn
New Legacy Drivers - 20 June 2006
Hi everyone,
Been awhile since the last news update - but if you have been reading the forums then you know lots is happening.
Just a FYI, tonight we have released new legacy BETA's for rt2500, rt2570 and the new RT61. These hopefull will see us through to stability with rt2x00.
All thanks to Gertjan for the RT61 work.
Any problems, please post on the forums.
Third rt2x00 BETA Release - 18th December 2005
Hello everyone,
This release is the third preview of the rt2x00 driver. Please see the changelog for more details.
We are interested in seeing results from people configuring and attempting associations on open AP's. This will be the last BETA release before our migration to a new core ieee80211 stack.
Any bugs you find please open a new thread on the forums here for discussion. After review we may then ask you to promote the bug into SorceForge.
Any questions, please post a thread.
Files are available @Sourceforge: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/rt2400/rt2x00-2.0.0-b3.tar.gz?download
The forums can be found at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB2
Initial rt2x00 BETA Release - 4th September 2005
Hi everyone, Tonight we have released the first BETA for our rt2x00 Driver Rebuild project. This is a developed-from-the-ground-up driver that we have been developing in a hope to stabalise support for the Ralink rt2x00 chipset family, which includes the 802.11b rt2400 chipset, the 802.11g rt2500 chipset and the 802.11g USB rt2570 chipset. A more detailed explination of what is contained in this BETA can be found on our forums at - http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=316 If you have any questions please feel free to post. Regards, Mark Wallis Project Leader
It's broke ! - Current issues - 24th August 2005
Hi everyone.
To try and reduce the number of support requests on the forums i've created a It's Broke page.
This page lists the current known possible issues as reported on the forums that are worth
investigating if you have problems.
PLEASE READ IT before posting a Support Request.
Regards, Mark.
In the news: Ralink and our developers recognised for RT2500 Chipset - 6th August 2005
In the August 2005 issue of Linux Journal (www.linuxjournal.com) Ralink were awarded the "Product of the Year" award for their rt2500 802.11g chipset. Our development team were also mentioned in the article as per below
"Ralink worked with Mark Wallis, Ivo van Doorn, Luis Correia, Robin Cornelius and others to get a supported driver out there under the GPL".
Special mention was also given to one of our supporting companies,
"Special thanks to Minitar, the network gear vendor with the foresight to ask Ralink to make the driver GPL".
Good work to everyone involved.
Mark Wallis Project Leader.
Updated BETA Drivers - 31st July 2005
Hi everyone,
We have released 3 new BETA drivers tonight
rt2400 1.2.2 BETA 3 rt2500 1.1.0 BETA 3 rt2570 1.1.0 BETA 1
These rollup all the work we have been doing in CVS of late. Any bugs you find, please report them to SourceForge. Of course, before raising any bugs you should have read the Module/TESTING file plus the Sticky post on raising bugs in the forums.
If you have a support request with these Beta's feel free to open a new Thread in the appropriate forum.
Regards, Mark Wallis
New Forums !! - 16th June 2005
Hello everyone,
As you can see from the new button on the menu bar up the top of this page we have installed some new Forum software into the website. We are trying to centralise our support for the project and feel that this is the best way to move forward. This will consolidate the SourceForge forums, the support I was giving on the Ralink forums plus the Support Requests that were coming through the General mailing list.
If everyone could migrate over to using the new forums it would be appreciated. I will be closing down the old support methods progressivly (they will still remain for historical purposes though so we won't lose any old posts).
Kind Regards, Mark
Previous news archive is also available
RSS
We also provide a couple of RSS feeds for our users.
The News Feed will give you up-to-date info on any file releases or major happenings with the project.
The Forum Feed will give you a direct feed from all the forums on our website.
And finally, BETA Testing Feed will give you a direct feed from our rt2x00 BETA testing forum.
Thanks
Our deepest thanks go out to the following groups and individuals
- Ralink for providing the chipsets and placing their source-code under the GPL license
- The developers for their hard work and sleepless nights
- Minitar for making the initial push to get the source under GPL license
- All the contributors that have helped along the way
- Hardware vendors that have donated rt2x00 based cards to help development
- Hardware donations not related to rt2x00 based cards