Ok so im trying to get my zenwalk install ironed out. Heres the deal its installed on an averatec 3700 series laptop that uses the ralink rt2500 wireless chipset. Ive read several how-to's and quick fixes on getting this wireless card to work, but all of them are different and all are very confusing...im at a complete loss here. could someone walk me through what to do step by step? I would really appreciate it

The option that works best for me, is to use ndiswrapper and just install the windows driver. There is a nice gui for ndis in the system menu.
Using that method i am able to scan for networks more reliable and generally it just works better.

So find the driver on the driver cd, that went with the card and point ndiswrapper to it.

well its been quite,  quiet about, stuff. for the RTxx chipset...

and im not to say that im verry knowlegable with it.. or debuggin it...

but here are some pointers...

1 there is an opensource rt2500 chipset driver...  > look here...
2 you will need to reed a decent tutorial yourself...
3 you need to use the version right from the cvs tree, (for new 'future'  kernel versions),
4 you need to build that agains your kernel headers, 
5 you need to install the build module,
6 you need to (enable) or load the new installed module with the kernel manager, app thats in zen 4.6

i told this to someone on irc today (not sure if it was you),  and he said it worked well...

I'm using a rt2500 card that I pulled out of an Averatec 3700 laptop; it is now in a Toshiba Satallite A15-S129.  The card worked fine under ZW 4.4.1 (Using ndiswrapper), however, I installed ZW 4.6.1 without backing up that partition.  I downloaded the driver from the Averatec website.  I installed it using the GUI for ndiswrapper that is included in 4.6.1.  The card is recognized, however, wifi-radar is not usable (There are over a dozen networks visible from my home location; apartment building) and from what I've read wifi-radar seems to have a problem when many networks are in range, so I've installed RutilT 0.14 which I used successfully under 4.4.1 for the same reason.

On this laptop I can also boot Windows XP and XUbuntu (Feisty), both are able to use the wireless connection without a problem.

If I boot strait into ZW RUtiliT will not report any visable networks, however, if I boot into either Windows or XUbuntu and then reboot into ZW I am able to connect to my AP and RutilT reports all of my neighbors networks as well.

I am very confused by this, any help that can be provided is greatly appreciated.

I had the same problem when I installed Zenwalk a couple of days ago. I solved it this way;

1. Download opensource driver from here: http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php?title=Downloads. I had to use the CVS.
2. Untar the tarball, enter the directory called Module.
3. Execute as root

4. Test the driver with modprobe.

5. I added the Wavelan item to the panel and configured it to ra0 to check.
6. Add a line to the bottom of /etc/rc.d/rc.modules

7. Should work at reboot.

Hope this helps.

Pretty sure you told this to me! Thanks again!

-bonden

Hello,

Does anyone have drivers tarball rt2500-cvs-200706xxx ?

Because the last rt2500-cvs-2007072713 drivers seems does not work on zenwalk 4.6.1 with kernel 2.6.21.3.

bonden => Could you give me your tarball package about with you compile module ?

My PCMCIA Card is Asus SpaceLink WL-107g and she has been worked very fine with Zenwalk 3.0

Thanks for advance.