Tech Juice

If you have several wired and/or wireless interfaces, the default Ubuntu network-manager program will manage them all. To make the network manager ignore an interface, you must edit the /etc/network/interfaces file.

The /etc/network/interfaces file contains network interface configuration information for the both Ubuntu and Debian Linux. This is where you configure how your system is connected to the network.

Look at your current interfaces:

$ ifconfig

To make network-manager ignore wlan0:

$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

And add the line:

iface wlan0 inet manual

The manual keyword denotes that network-manager should ignore the interface. After a reboot, the network manager will show device not managed for wlan0.…

Introduction

If you have a Ralink 3090 (RT3090) wireless network card, you can run into problems when running Linux. These problems manifest themselves as a connection that is unreliable and slow, or even completely broken.

The Linux kernel decides which modules (drivers) should be loaded for your hardware setup, but it can get it wrong. If you are having lots of wireless networking problems, you probably don’t have the correct modules loaded. The included-by-default kernel module that seems to give the best results with the RT3090 is called rt2860sta. If you are running Ubuntu, you can try the rt3090-dkms package, which might give better results than the rt2860sta module.

List Modules

To see your currently loaded kernel modules:

$ lsmod | less

Using the rt3090-dkms Module

If you are running Ubuntu, this module might give better results than rt2860. In my case Ubuntu would no longer shut down, but there are many positive stories about the module too.

First, install the package from the Markus Heberling’s personal package archive.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:markus-tisoft/rt3090
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install dkms rt3090-dkms

Now you should …