USB Wireless Dongles and Ubuntu

[Giles Orr]

I have a friend with a dual boot computer running Windows XP and
Ubuntu Dapper.  He'd like to be using Linux more, but we're on the
third USB dongle wireless network adapter, and we're both approaching
the breaking point (maybe it's just me - he's pretty patient).  I've
recommended a PCI NIC on general principles, but that may not be
viable as he's already forked out some cash.

He currently has a Linksys WUSB11 v2.5, which appears to be supported
(and works fine under XP).  It requires the "linux-wlan-ng" package,
something I've never worked with before.  We're talking to a 802.11B
(not G) hub.  I edited /etc/wlan/wlancfg-linux-wlan to include the
SSID and WEP=true and the PRIV_GENSTR="secret" (their password). Then
ran the following script:

modprobe -r prism2_usb
modprobe prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1  # found this somewhere else than
main docs, but without it - no go
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=jgc authtype=opensystem
ifconfig wlan0  # not needed?
dhclient wlan0  # fails here

At this point the command 'iwlist scanning' shows the router,
including the MAC address, which would seem to indicate that it's got
WEP up and running?  But 'dhclient' gets no response.  It occurs to
me, now that I'm several kilometers away that maybe wlan-ng has a
dhclient replacement, given its other non-standard behaviour ...

Another interesting thing to throw into the mix is that from my
laptop, which otherwise seems to be working fine on their wireless
network, pinging the router gets me about 50% duplicates - one ping
packet sent, anywhere from one to four returned.  I've never seen that
before (I'm using an Intel chipset on a relatively recent Dell
laptop).

Any help appreciated.

As an alternative, if you know where I could buy a cheap(!) PCI NIC
that's _readily_ Linux compatible, I might buy that for him for
Christmas.  Suggestions on this also welcome.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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