A year ago, I bought an Edimax USB wireless adaptor for my workhorse Ubuntu box. After spending a day sweating over my random collection of cheap old usb adapters and not getting any of them to work, I was pleasantly surprised when my Edimax arrived and proceeded to “just work” upon being plugged in.

A few days ago, I hosed my harddrive on that box (sigh) and had to reinstall the wireless adapter. It did not plug and play in the fresh install (obviously in my earlier attempts with the older USB adapters, I installed and blacklisted the right drivers for EdiMax to “just work”). In a quick search, I came across a few forums where my “plug n play” review was referenced on NewEgg so here’s a step by step (and NewEgg! No way for me to revise a review ?!?).

1. First, Ubuntu 12.04 includes the RT2800usb driver by default so you shouldn’t need to download it. However, if you do for some reason need to download it, EdiMax does not provide a Linux driver, but the EdiMax uses the Ralink RT2870 series USB chipset. You can download the Ralink driver which you’ll need to compile
2. Check that there are no collisions: sudo lsmod | grep rt If that outputs anything other than rt2800, you’ll need to blacklist the non-rt2800 driver to prevent a collision. sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and add blacklist rt**** to the end of the file (where the **** represents the driver number)

I was able to connect to my network at this point, but then I tried to update to the non-free proprietary video drivers and that download seemed to freeze. So it might be advisable to reboot before updating the system.

A shoutout to the R statistics blog for reminding me about the need add conflicting drivers to modprobe blacklist.