Getting the DWA 125 wireless usb dongle to work on Debian Squeeze

I had a previous post similar to this for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS but it wasn't working for me in Debian. So I had to find another way.

The mighty D-Link DWA-125 Wireless USB dongle!!! 

Fortunately for me, Debian has some non-free packages available for the device so no compiling needed. To install it, you need to append the word non-free to the sources list like so:

# nano /etc/apt/sources.list

In this file, add non-free to the end of the line:

deb http://ftp.tw.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main non-free 

Then install the driver:

# aptitude install firmware-ralink wireless-tools

Note that my Debian installation was a standard one but I chose the XFCE4 desktop environment and laptop-tools during install so wireless-tools was already installed. As with the previous post, the drivers seem to get mixed up so I needed to do the ff so that the correct driver, rt2870sta will be used (of course, you can just edit the config file directly):

# echo "blacklist rt2800usb" 
# tee --append /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

As I mentioned, I installed the XFCE4 desktop manager and so it installs WICD (network manager) with it. I burned about 1 hour figuring out a way to connect via WICD because it kept getting stuck at Obtaining IP address and wouldn't connect. Here's what I did, in case you are using WICD. Apparently, the WICD Debian wiki said that only the loopback interface should be in the /etc/network/interfaces file. So I checked mine and ended with something like (notice the last 2 lines are commented out):

# The loopback network interface 
auto lo iface lo inet loopback 

# The primary network interface 
#allow-hotplug eth0 
#iface eth0 inet dhcp 

A reboot later, everything worked!