Belkin F5D7050 Wireless USB Stick and Linux

I have recently purchased an Belkin F5D7050 Wireless USB Dongle, and I have managed to get it running succesfully under Gentoo Linux. However the setup was not straightforward, so I decided to write this short guide. The good news is that after the driver was setup, the connection worked flawlessly and with a native open source driver.

The wireless driver is provided by the CVS versionof the rt2x00 project, but there is also an ebuild in the Portage Tree. This ebuild depends on old kernels, and trying to compile it will give you the following error:

* rt2x00-9999 requires support for Wireless LAN drivers (non-hamradio) & Wireless Extensions (CONFIG_NET_RADIO).
* Please check to make sure these options are set correctly.
* Failure to do so may cause unexpected problems.
* Once you have satisfied these options, please try merging
* this package again.

Try as hard as you want to, but you won’t be able to find these options in the latest kernels. Instead they have been replaced by the CONFIG_MAC80211 option. Make sure that this setting is compiled as eighter a module or built-in. If you are using a graphical tool to configure your .config file, you can find this option under Networking -> Wireless -> Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211). Recompile your kernel, and proceed to the next part of the guide.

Download the latest CVS tarball from the project’s download page. Make sure you get the one under the heading rt73 (USB), because that’s the one for the chip inside your Belkin Wireless Dongle.

Now unpack, compile and install the driver. Make sure you replace the date in the directory with the date of the tarball.
# tar -xvzf rt73-cvs-daily.tar.gz
# cd rt73-cvs-2007081120/Module
# make
# make install

Now you are ready to use your new wireless dongle. Just run the command “modprobe rt73” and you are set! I recommend following the Wireless Configuration and Startup guide to configure your network.