USB Wireless Dongles and Ubuntu

[Colin McGregor]

You might want to have a read through on this article
by Jes Hall:

http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000167

All about using ndiswrapper (which to be blunt kind of
sucks, running a Windows hardware driver under Linux),
but it is another possible option...

Colin McGregor

--- Giles Orr <gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> 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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