USB wifi Dongles, Kismet, Toronto

[Colin McGregor]

--- Byron Sonne <blsonne-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Could any recommend a make & model of usb wifi
> dongle that works with 
> Kismet, and is available in a college st. store?
> I've not had much luck 
> with the newer gear.
> 
> Cheers,
> Byron

I don't have a direct comment, but my $0.02 worth. 

A while back I bought a TRENDnet TEW-424UB USB 802.11g
USB dongle for use with my (older) laptop, thinking
that it would be great, could use this with laptop,
and I could in a pinch use this with a desktop
machine. I had checked on-line and the TRENDnet
TEW-424UB was lsited as having a native Linux driver. 

What could go wrong? A few things. First my laptop
only supports USB 1.1 and this dongle DEMANDS USB 2.0.
Second the dongle I got was version 2, which unlike
version 1 does not have a native Linux driver, you can
still make this dongle run under Linux with
ndiswrapper, but that adds another layer of mess/pain.
Thirdly at the time the laptop was running Debian
Sarge, which doesn't support 802.11g (explains why my
laptop was my first machine to move to Debian Etch
(then Debian Testing), just to get decent 802.11g
support with an SMC PCMCIA wireless card).

The TRENDnet TEW-424UB V2 I gather has been replaced
by the TRENDnet TEW-424UB V2.1 (I have no idea how 
different the two models are, but I would tread with
care...)

So, make sure the issue is NOT your PC (i.e.: you
might be in trouble there). Make sure your Linux
Distro. has WIFI support. Then you can start looking
into driver issues...

Colin McGregor

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