Skip to content
Sep 24 / kkrizka

Belkin F5D7050 on OpenSuse 10.3

My computer is in my room, which has no wired internet connection. This means that I have to use a wireless card, more specifically the Belkin F5D7050 Wireless USB Stick that only needed the open source module compiled on Gentoo Linux. OpenSuse 10.3 came with a module from the rt2×00 project, and even loaded the rt73usb driver (the wireless stick has the RT73 chipset) by default! But every time I tried to start the interface by doing “ifconfig wlan0 up”, I got the following error:

SIOCSIFFLAGS: No buffer space available.

Google was of no help here, because most of the results said that ndiswrapper was the solution. In the end I decided to try out the infamous ndiswrapper following guide. The guide contains a bit too much information, and in the end it did not work. In the end it turned out that OpenSuse was shipped with the older rt73 version, which needed binary drivers to be installed. No OpenSuse documentation ever mentioned it, and the only reason I found out was because I decided to check the dmesg log. I found an error message about a missing rt73.bin file, which I did not have to install using the CVS version. Then looking through the rt2x00 readme (which was hard to find just by itself), I found that I need to download the firmware from the RaLink website. The package you need is available through their Linux support page, and is called Firmware RT2501USB(RT2571W/RT2671). After you download the package, extract the included rt73.bin file, and move it to the /lib/firmware/ directory. Finally reload the rt73usb driver by issuing the following commands as root, and you are done:

rmmod rt73usb
modprobe rt73usb

3 Comments

Leave a comment
  1. Mic / Dec 22 2007

    Followed your tips above and got wireless working but was unable to get it connected automatically.

    Need to select the essid and key in the password upon every reboot.

    Tried adding into Yast -> Network but still no go.

    Do you have a way to get it connected automatically?

    • Karol Krizka / Dec 23 2007

      If it’s not working through Yast, then I am not sure what is wrong. You might also want to enable Network Manager.

  2. Mic / Dec 30 2007

    Oops, the wireless connection becomes erratic after using the above method.

    The connection will drop after 10-20 minutes of use.

    You mentioned “enable Network Manager”, appreciate if you could advise how to do it, thanks.

Leave a comment
Cancel reply