Tech Juice

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 …