install driver D-Link DWA-525 A2 on Ubuntu 12.04

Ref: mtotschn.blogspot.com

D-Link DWA-525 A2 on Ubuntu 12.04

Trying to make a newly bought D-Link Wireless N 150 PCI Desktop Adapter DWA-525 A2 work under Ubuntu 12.04 (precise). References like this blog post that refer to drivers from the Ralinktech website do not work for the A2 version of the device. You can find out, what version you have through

lspci |grep -i ralink

which for the A2 should give:

05:03.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. Device 5360 

Wikidevi references a patch to the rt2800pci module (part of the rt2x00 driver) but I found no explanation on how to apply this to a Ubuntu 12.04, and it took some time to find out. The patch seems to apply to Kernel 3.4, but Precise uses 3.2. Ubuntuforums has a thread on the topic and one posting explains how to patch a download of compat-wireless for kernel 2.6 manually.

Instead of going that route, I wanted to give the patch for the 3.4. version a try, and on the way document a solution that would be easier to reproduce. The compat-wireless releases can be found at http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download/stable/ , the patch is linked from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/pipermail/users_rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/2012-May/004942.html . Putting that together:

wget http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/pipermail/users_rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/attachments/20120507/e2072201/attachment.bin
wget http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-3-stable/v3.4/compat-wireless-3.4-rc3-1.tar.bz2
tar -xjf compat-wireless-3.4-rc3-1.tar.bz2
cd  compat-wireless-3.4-rc3-1
patch -p1 <../attachment.bin
./scripts/driver-select rt2x00
make
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo modprobe rt2800pci

With this, the card should be recognized and start to work. I suspect that the compilation of the module has to be redone each time, the kernel is upgraded.