Both new versions of the MSI Wind and the Asus Eee 1000H now often comes equipped with the RaLink 2860 wireless card. This works fine in Windows and supposedly also in OSX, but in Linux it wont neccesarly be able to connect to WPA protected networks. Networks are detected, but you wont be able to connect to them. The solution is luckily short and simple, read on

This has been tested on a clean install of Mandriva 2009 and has been confirmed to work on other Linux distros as well.

 First you will need to make sure ndiswrapper is installed. Mandriva comes with ndiswrapper already configured, so you can skip that step if you happen to be running Mandriva.

Step 1: Download and unzip the driver files to a folder on your linux installation –> download here

Step 2: We need to black list the drivers that are already installed in Linux so that ndiswrapper handles the card alone. Following Code should do it.

 echo ‘blacklist rt 2860’' | tee –a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

 then we need to make ndiswrapper load the driver at every boot

 echo ‘ndiswrapper’ | tee –a /etc/modules

 then navigate to the directory where you unzipped the driver you just downloaded in the terminal. cd <path>. Then run the following

ndiswrapper –i rt2860.inf

Check that everything worked out by typing

ndiswrapper –lIf it says that the driver is installed, then you are good to go. Reboot your system and everything should be working fine. It it doesnt, feel free to ask for help :)

 UPDATE: After installing the 369 updates that a fresh install of Mandriva One has available, I found that the wifi wasnt working anymore. To get it working again, remove the driver you installed  and then repeat the steps above.

 To remove: 

ndiswrapper -r rt2860 

Good luck!