Gigabyte AirCruiser N300 802.11n WiFi Adapter

Performance:

Unfortunately, the Ralink RT2860 isn't yet supported "out of the box" on Linux. There is no RT2860 driver in the upstream Linux kernel, but Ralink does offer an RT2860STA Linux driver that is released under the GNU GPLv2 license. However, this driver's last release was in January and it currently doesn't build against the Linux 2.6.24 kernel. This driver though does support suspend and resume as well as power saving modes and hopefully will be pushed into the mainline Linux kernel in the future. With it not being in the mainline kernel and not building against Linux 2.6.24, this driver isn't found with Ubuntu 8.04. There is, however, an easy solution for attaining Linux support and that is through ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper is an open-source kernel module that allows wireless drivers for Windows to be loaded on Linux using this driver wrapper that implements the APIs to the relevant portions of the Windows kernel and NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification).

Ubuntu 8.04 ships with the ndiswrapper kernel module, but ndiswrapper-common and ndiswrapper-utils must be installed out of Ubuntu's repositories. Once these packages are installed (sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils), the Gigabyte GN-WI30N-RH wireless driver for Windows must be installed with ndiswrapper. Fortunately, the INF and SYS files for the Gigabyte driver aren't packaged inside of a self-extracting EXE (which would require extracting on a Windows machine or using WINE), but they are just contained within a folder on the Gigabyte CD. Specifically, we had used the rt2860.inf/rt2860.sys found in N300/drivers/GN-WI30N_WP30N_WS30N/WINXP2k with the included CD. The driver can be loaded then using sudo ndiswrapper -i rt2860.inf. To check for success, run ndiswrapper -l, which will list all ndiswrapper drivers. Lastly, load the ndiswrapper kernel module with sudo modprobe ndiswrapper.