I am currently playing with Mepis 6.05 beta and trying to get a rt2500 chipped 
wireless pci card working
Output of iwconfig
mit@2[~]$ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.
wlan0     RT2500 Wireless  ESSID:"NETGEAR"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:14:6C:95:B1:94
          Bit Rate:11 Mb/s   Tx-Power:2 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Link Quality=53/100  Signal level=-87 dBm  Noise level:-192 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
eth0      no wireless extensions.
This is what iwconfig returns before I start playing with it, the essid 
(above) is not my network its a neighbours (although my essid is not hidden).
lspci give:
mit@2[~]$ lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8375 [KM266/KL266] Host 
Bridge
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]
0000:00:0a.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI (rev 
01)
0000:00:0b.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 
07)
<snip>
lsmod does show the rt2500 module loaded (did not want to printout the entire 
list)
I have tried using both Mepis configuration tool and Kwifimanager, I know the 
card works as the card and PC used to run win2000 until it got a bad dose 
bsod.
After entering all the details like essid, mac address of the AP, channel, 
frequency, encrpytion key all via iwconfig, it looks like this
root@2[mit]# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.
wlan0     RT2500 Wireless  ESSID:"homenet"  Nickname:"default"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.412 GHz  Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:0 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:6F7A-6F6E-6573-616D-6900-0000-00   Security 
mode:restricted
          Link Quality=53/100  Signal level=-27 dBm  Noise level:-192 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
eth0      no wireless extensions.
ifconfig returns
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0E:2E:57:8E:4B
          inet addr:192.168.1.70  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:32172 errors:96 dropped:96 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:78 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:78 (78.0 b)  TX bytes:1553815 (1.4 MiB)
          Interrupt:17 Base address:0x4000
But there are no lights on the card or internet access, the machine thinks it 
working as the wireless network comes up saying it is connected and it then 
confuses itself as it also has eth0 which then fails to work until I ifdown 
wlan0 (I have dropped eth0 but the lan still failed to connect)
I have mac filtering and wpa-psk with tkip on the AP, I have turned the 
encryption off but still no joy. Everything I have read says that the card is 
linux compatible.
I know I could try ndiswrapper but as this card is confirmed as being linux 
compatible then I want to try and run it natively.
Any suggestions?
Tim
        
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