This is a follow-up to my previous post about a USB wireless dongle I had acquired some weeks ago.

As I said this device shows up as:

Bus 002 Device 008: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp.
    RT2501USB Wireless Adapter

There seems to be some ambiquity about the vendorid/productid because this matches multiple chipsets. Usually it is pointing to rt73 chipset but be warned!

Firstly I installed Gentoo in VirtualBox since I didn't want to mess with my Estobuntu install. The rt2x00 guys have landed in Linux Git repository and they have a branch there with most up-to-date drivers. Note that this pulls over 100MB of changsets!:

cd /usr/src
git clone
    git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ivd/rt2x00.git
    linux-rt2x00
ln -s linux-rt2x00 linux
cd linux
make menuconfig # Enable rt2x00 modules under networking device drivers
make -j4
make modules_install
make install
nano /boot/grub/grub.conf

Next I installed hostapd. Note that "iwconfig wlan0 mode master" DOES NOT work anymore. Instead hostapd is used which is relies on new mac80211 framework in kernel to set wireless card settings. Gentoo had hostapd version 0.6.9 in portage which failed with this card, I installed manually 0.7.2:

wget http://hostap.epitest.fi/releases/hostapd-0.7.2.tar.gz
tar xvzf hostapd-0.7.2.tar.gz
cd hostapd
cp defconfig .config
nano .config # Enable CONFIG_DRIVER_NL80211 there
make
make install

Afterward I created hostapd.conf with content like this:

interface=wlan0
driver=nl80211
ssid=test
channel=1

Note that before starting hostapd I needed firmware for this card. Firmware wasn't shipped within the Git branch. I had to copy it from my Estobuntu install. The file in question is /lib/firmware/rt73.bin, I placed it in the same place in my virtual machine:

hostapd -dd /path/to/hostapd.conf

The AP should be visible now. Next step is to set IP for the card:

ifconfig wlan0 192.168.100

Finally I had to configure DHCP server in /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf and restart DHCP server.