In one of my last articles I've wrote about excellent Ralink RT3090 Ubuntu driver PPA by Launchpad user Markus Heberling, thanks Markus for your work. Here is the link to this article:

Wireless network Ralink RT3090 Ubuntu driver PPA

Recently I've had to use OpenSuse 11.4 on a laptop with RT3090 wireless network adapter. On OpenSuse you are left with open source drivers that work great but not as good as Ralink proprietary drivers. In this article I'm bringing you OpenSuse 11.04 rpm packages with Ralink RT3090 2.4.0.4 proprietary wireless driver for 32-bit architecture. I'm also providing OpenSuse src.rpm packages you can use to rebuild this driver package for your kernel architecture or kernel version. For this packages I've backported all Markus Heberling Ralink rt3090 driver patches from his Ubuntu RT3090 PPA.

Like I've wrote inside my rt3090 Ubuntu PPA article, first thing to do is to stop open source Ralink kernel module from loading and interfering with our proprietary driver like this. We will also install nano CLI text editor (works on Gnome and KDE and other Linux desktops), open /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf as root like this:

sudo zypper install nano
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf

We will paste following code at the end of the 50-blacklist.conf file:

# Blacklist conflicting RaLink driver modules
blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2800lib
blacklist rt2x00usb
blacklist rt2x00pci
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2860sta

Now we press Ctrl+X to save changes, answer with "Y" to "Save modified buffer" prompt and press enter to accept default file name. Next time we reboot, unwanted open source rt3090 driver module and all conflicting modules will be blacklisted from loading.

Next thing is to download my 32-bit Ralink RT3090 2.4.0.4 driver tarball containing OpenSuse packages by clicking on the following link and to save this tarball on your desktop:

OpenSuse_11.04_rt3090_driver_i586.tar.bz2

Next we need to decompress our rt3090 driver tarball like this:

cd ~/Desktop
tar -xjvf OpenSuse_11.04_rt3090_driver_i586.tar.bz2
cd OpenSuse_11.04_rt3090_driver_i586

Now we need to see what kernel variant are we using ("default", "pae", "xen" or most probably "desktop") using this command:

uname -r

Output of this command will be something like this:

2.6.37.6-0.5-desktop

Last thing is to install rpm packages with rt3090 driver using standard CLI procedure. First we install common part of driver that doesn't depend on your kernel variant:

sudo rpm -Uvh rt3090sta-common-2.4.0.4-0.ak.0.noarch.rpm

Next we install kernel module for our specific kernel variant (we've used uname -r to find out our kernel variant):

"default" kernel variant

sudo rpm -Uvh rt3090sta-kmp-default-2.4.0.4_k2.6.37.6_0.5-0.ak.0.i586.rpm

"desktop" kernel variant

sudo rpm -Uvh rt3090sta-kmp-desktop-2.4.0.4_k2.6.37.6_0.5-0.ak.0.i586.rpm

"pae" kernel variant

sudo rpm -Uvh rt3090sta-kmp-pae-2.4.0.4_k2.6.37.6_0.5-0.ak.0.i586.rpm

"xen" kernel variant

sudo rpm -Uvh rt3090sta-kmp-xen-2.4.0.4_k2.6.37.6_0.5-0.ak.0.i586.rpm

One important thing to mention is that you will at least need to reinstall these packages after every OpenSuse kernel upgrade. Ideal situation would be that you recompile these packages against future updated kernel versions (these are compiled against 2.6.37.6_0.5-0 OpenSuse kernel version). From my experience OpenSuse kernel updates are not invasive and this driver packages will work fine with any future OpenSuse 2.6.37 kernel revision. If you have 64-bit OpenSuse you will also need to compile your own packages

Introduction into compiling your own rt3090 driver packages (advanced users)

If you know how to compile these packages and you know how to install all dependencies for compiling kernel modules your self, here is the link to the rt3090 2.4.0.4 OpenSuse driver SRPM, with Markus Heberling Ubuntu patches backported by me:

OpenSuse_11.04_rt3090_driver_i586_src.rpm.tar.bz2

When you've installed all dependencies and rpm build tools you can use something like this command to make rpm for your exact current kernel version:

rpmbuild -- rebuild rt3090sta-2.4.0.4-0.ak.0.src.rpm

If you have 32-bit OpenSuse 11.4 on your PC and you are not advanced user I advise you to use rt3090 OpenSuse 11.4 wireless driver packages I've compiled because they should work with all stable OpenSuse kernel updates (with reinstalling driver packages after every kernel update). OpenSuse is great Linux distribution, I might add. Cheers!