Sitecom Wireless WL-608 54g USB dongle under Ubuntu

I bought one of these USB dongles, and it didn't work.

$ lsusb

gave (amongst other lines)


Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0df6:003f Sitecom Europe B.V.

The identifier for the chipset is this bit:

0df6:003f 


A quick google found this page:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-wireless-networking-41/fedora-13-cant-connect-to-wireless-network-in-networkmanager-815638/

Which is talking about Fedora.

Someone here suggests

"That card needs the rt2870sta driver, according to this: link. I have the same problem on my box because the system automatically also loads in the rt2800usb driver, which conflicts."



$ lsmod | grep rt

$ sudo rmmod rt2800usb && sudo rmmod rt2x00usb && sudo rmmod rt2x00lib

$ sudo modprobe rt2870sta

This all seemed to work, but nothing happened.

Eventually it occurred to me to remove the dongle and then plug it back in.

At that point, the kernel recognised the dongle, the network manager app noticed that it had a new interface, and reported a list of available wireless networks, and all was well.

I note only that the list of wireless networks is not as long as the one reported by my Dell Mini 10v, so it seems the dongle isn't as sensitive as my netbook. But you can't really blame it since it's attached to the back of a mains powered device.


Now I add these lines to the bottom of  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:


# To stop bad drivers blocking the correct driver for usb wireless dongle
# See http://johnsunixtips.blogspot.com/2010/08/sitecom-wireless-wl-608-54g-usb-dongle.html
blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2x00usb
blacklist rt2x00lib

Reboot after that, just to check it will all work from a standing start. My machine now starts up and connect instantly to our house network.