SH8 WLAN with Ubuntu 7.10

The Kohjinsha SH8 has the RT73 USB WLAN adapter.
~$ lspci |grep -i net
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 01)

Getting the WLAN to work was a bit tricky, but now it's working :-)
Here is what I did:

1) download the source of the current RT73 driver here: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/rt73-cvs-daily.tar.gz
(I downloaded the rt73-cvs-2007120216 release)

2) unpack with tar -zxvf and read the README file (always helpful)

3) compile the sources (as stated in the README file) with make and install the driver with make install

4) open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist as root and add the following lines:
blacklist rt2570
blacklist rt2500usb
blacklist rt2x00usb
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt73usb

(explanation later)

5) If you came so far, you should get the following output:
~$ sudo iwconfig
wlan0 RT73 WLAN
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:113
Rx invalid nwid:0 invalid crypt:0 invalid misc:0

and ifconfig doesn't show wlan0 at all.

6) Do the following
sudo modprobe -rv rt73
sudo modprobe -v rt73

and then start the device with
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

Make sure your wlan adapter is switched on!! (Function key + F4)

You now should get the following output when executing iwconfig and ifconfig:
~$ sudo iwconfig
wlan0 RT73 WLAN ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency=2.412 GHz Bit Rate=54 Mb/s
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Link Quality=0/100 Signal level:-121 dBm Noise level:-115 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

~$ sudo ifconfig
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0D:F0:47:00:0B
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:66 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:242 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3679 (3.5 KB) TX bytes:16434 (16.0 KB)

So in principle everything should be working now and sudo iwlist wlan0 scanning should give you a list of the available wireless networks.

7) configure your wlan network settings, i.e. define the essid, key, etc. of your network. The following is for a network with WEP key and DHCP.

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid your-network-name
sudo iwconfig wlan0 key your-network's-key

and finally request an IP from the DHCP server.

sudo dhclient wlan0

When you setup your network this way you don't change /etc/network/interfaces and hence you have to do everything from step 6 onwards every time you boot into Ubuntu. It's probably a good idea to get this done automatically, which I will do and post here later. Right now I'm just happy that I can type this post on my Kohjinsha using Ubuntu 7.10 :-)

EDIT: since I don't use the WLAN very often, I put all the commands from step 6 onwards in a little shell script and run it when necessary.

Important message: Sorry, I haven't had time to link to the most useful forum posts which helped me to set things up. References will follow soon... however I wanted to post a few things now before I forget how I did it.

-------
Random notes: when messing around with the wlan settings, trying many different things, which I found on various websites, I came to one stage where iwconfig showed the following

wlan0 RT73 WLAN ESSID:"my-network"
Mode:Managed Frequency=2.412 GHz Bit Rate=54 Mb/s
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Link Quality=0/100 Signal level:-121 dBm Noise level:-115 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

i.e. the essid was set to the right network, but I got a link quality of 0/100, which isn't too good obviously. iwlist wlan0 scanning showed the available wireless networks though. If I remember correctly this happened, because I blacklisted not all of the modules listed in 4).