Wireless networking - should I install Ralink driver?

[Frank Millman]

Hi all

I am running Fedora 10 - 2.6.27.24-170.2.68.fc10.i686.

I have installed a D-Link DWA-510 Wireless NIC. 'lspci -nn' shows it as
'RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g [1814:0302]'.

After reading the Quick Howto in Linux Wireless Networking, I set up the
card by typing the appropriate values in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/
- ifcfg-wlan0 and keys-wlan0. I have not installed any additional drivers.

Basically it works. To begin with it dropped the connection from time to
time, but then I experimented with channels and ended up setting everything
to Channel 11. That seems to have fixed that problem.

Now my only problem is that, on startup, the card does not always initialise
first time. It appears to bring up wlan0 successfully, and it appears to
start wpa_supplicant successfully. However, the next step is to mount an NFS
share. Sometimes it works first time, but usually it sits there for a while
and then fails. If I then check iwconfig, it shows no Access Points, and 0
for Link Quality. I then run 'service network restart' and 'service
wpa_supplicant restart' a couple of times, and it usually comes up on the
second or third attempt.

The Fedora box is about 10 feet from the Access Point. I have a couple of
Windows laptops further away which connect with no problems.

My next step was going to be to install the Ralink driver downloaded from
their site, but I thought I would check here first to see if there are any
other suggestions.

TIA

Frank Millman