All,
On HP 3115m (business version of dm1z) with 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 there is a problem with the driver support for the ralink 3592 wireless chipset.
When using rt2800pci driver, the connection intermittently disconnects and fails to reconnect until one toggles the wireless via the hardware key (f12) off and then back on. After that it will connect but only for a little while before once again dropping the connection. Connection to some routers is more prone to disconnection than others. I tried changing channels, encryption protocol (wpa//wpa2), even a/b/g/n with no consistent results.
For this reason, I tried installing the official Ralink drivers (rt3562sta) that can be downloaded from http://www.ralinktech.com/en/04_support/support.php?sn=501 (namely RT3062PCI/mPCI/CB/PCIe(RT3060/RT3062/RT3562/RT3592) driver). I followed instructions (similar to the ones found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1850267) and installed the driver while blacklisting other drivers. Now here's the curious thing. If I modprobe the driver ("sudo modprobe rt3562sta", this is btw the name of the driver created by compiling), assuming that there are no other drivers loaded, I get nothing (e.g. "iwconfig" and "ifconfig" list no wireless devices).
However, if I type "sudo ifconfig ra0 up" the device does come up in "iwconfig" and "ifconfig", the LED on the keyboard turns on, and I can even scan for wireless networks via "iwlist scan" but the network-manager does not recognize existence of wireless. I also tried restarting network-manager and rebooting the machine and that had no effect.
Could this be because the wireless device is using ra0 as opposed to wlan0 (as was the case with the old wireless card) or is there something else causing problems? If so, how could one change this? Any suggestions regarding this would be most appreciated.