It is all helpful, and all appreciated. It is good to see the number of linux visitors here finally catch up with the number of Mac users 🙂

I am sure Mepis works fine for most people, but as I said here I appear to be under the curse of the LinuxGods. I have machines with 32bit SUSE and Ubuntu working fine (incidentally both use the same Belkin USB crap that I am trying to get working on this machine), but for various reasons (as basic as them being in different rooms) I wanted to try and get a 64bit version running on this PC.

I will give PCLinuxOS a try this weekend, it seems reasonable and that URL goes a long way to filling me with confidence. I should point out though, that 32bit SUSE and Ubuntu support this WiFi crap out of the box as well (or at least they certainly created the illusion of doing it on the other machines 🙂 )

Also, I am sure the hardware is more than slightly to blame (although it did work out of the box in Windows.. 🙂 ) and this was simply a blog rant rather than a direct cry for help. I am working through the different bits of advice I’ve had off the forums but it seems to be generally time consuming and so far still ineffective!

I hadn’t found the http://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/RalinkRT73 article, but it looks good so I will give that a shot next time. Shame about the rain forests 🙂

Seriously, thank you to everyone for the advice here.

The Belkin USB dongle uses a chip made from RaLink in it; it can be a pain to get it working even in Windows (I have experience to this point).

I ended up returning it and buying a PCI card instead. Linux was nice enough when I installed it to auto-connect the card and everything.

Anyways, ever consider that these problems could be related to the Hardware? Until vendors activly support kernel and driver development, a lot of this newer stuff is a bit hit-and-miss with initial functionality. Not until the parts are in the hands of an interested kernel programmer/patcher will a lot of this work… And, that actually ends up being rather quick, but maybe not quite today.

Wireless has been notoriously difficult for me, even with older cards. Here is another guy’s rant:
http://www.osweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2484
But I’ve read that new kernel changes are due to make this a bit better some time over the next year… yeah, always over the rainbow…

http://www.theloveoflinux.com/hwdb/?View=entry&EntryID=7

I know Texstar will eventually be releasing a 64bit version when he gets a chance to breath.

Currently, btw., the rt73 is reported to work on Ubuntu when you follow this howto close:
help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/RalinkRT73
It should easily work for other distributions as well – try to set up the GPL driver first (at the bottom of the page), if this doesn’t work try to take your shot on the other driver. But: read all comments first because they somtimes update the information of the article.

Good luck anyway.