Comment 23 for bug 521967

I have an EEE 1000 and also had wireless broken out of the box. The following rough steps are what I did to get it working again. Note these instructions are specifically for devices using the RT2860, you can look at the output of lspci to determine whether you have the RT2860 wireless card in your netbook.

Note: You may need to first run 'sudo apt-get install build-essential' before following these instructions. So get out your ethernet cable and plug-in.

Step 1. Download the latest driver source from www.ralinktech.com under Software->Linux. The driver I downloaded was:
RT2860PCI/mPCI/CB/PCIe(RT2760/RT2790/RT2860/RT2890) 01/29/2010 2.3.0.0

Step 2. Decompress the driver source:
bzip2 -d <file>.bz2
tar -xvf <file>.tar

Step 3. Go into the driver source directory that you just extracted, I will call this "driver-root" from now on.
Step 4. Edit os/linux/config.mk to enable WPA. Find the lines:
# Support wpa_supplicant
HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT = n

# Support for Native WpaSupplicant Network Maganger
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT = n

Change them to:
# Support wpa_supplicant
HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT = y

# Support for Native WpaSupplicant Network Maganger
HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT = Y

Step 5. Go to the driver-root and run 'make'.
Step 6. Disable wireless by right-clicking on networking and unchecking wireless
Step 7. Remove the existing rt2860sta module:
sudo rmmod rt2860sta

Step 8. Run 'sudo make install' from driver-root
Step 9. Install the module by running 'sudo modprobe rt2860sta'
Step 10. Use the gui to re-enable wireless and connect to your network.

Hope this helps.