So I’ve been persisting with using the rt2x00 drivers with 2.6.24 on Ubuntu Hardy but it wasn’t only slow (interface was quite often at 1Mb/s rather than 54Mb/s) but unreliable, dropping out every 15-20 minutes. A quick bounce of the interface brought it back but it’s just un-acceptable to do that indefinately.
I’d been booting into an older kernel in order to get working drivers, in the hope the new ones would be fixed and using them would be a quick reboot away, but after following the bug in launchpad it seemed quite clear that I was dreaming.
I bit the bullet last night and installed the old drivers. I had to pull them from CVS rather than using the packaged ones. But a quick ‘make && sudo make install’ and everything is working perfectly again.
I left a little note in the bug:
I’m not sure why this is “Medium”. Most computers these days are doorstops if they don’t have reliable networking.
You have a LTS release due next month and you are persisting with releasing broken drivers for Ralink chipsets. There was a point about a month ago where someone needed to make a call and either revert to the old drivers or commit to getting the new ones working in time for Hardy.
I for one am using the old drivers.