USB Wireless Adapters

[Panix]

I'm wondering if it has to do with the drivers being optimized or built into the later kernel. I'm using a distro (Mepis) that is at 2.6.22.

Mandriva and OpenSUSE are at 2.6.24 and 2.6.25, respectively, right? They both have LiveCDs (to test), right? Do either of them require a reboot when/after you setup your wireless usb adapter? I'd like to try both out to see if I have a similar experience to you.

I'd use whatever distro allows me a smooth wireless connection since I think that is really important and should be a standard procedure nowadays even considering the difficulties of dealing with Windows-oriented hardware.

[anyone]

Yes both Mandriva and OpenSUSE have live-cd:s and neither required a reboot after configuring the network... OpenSUSE had one problem with it's network manager though; the user interface wasn't entirely clear to me at first and if you first configured wrong, you can't edit the connection to make it work. You have to remove it and make a new one...
Mandriva had no such problem...

And I think Ubuntu 7.04 worked with the adapter too; I haven't tried the newer versions.

[pflynn]

I have a few D-Link DWL-122 dongles here that I bought on Ebay:



The DWL-122 is a nice 802.11b USB Wifi device, based on the Prism 2.x chipset and works out of the box with Linux using the open-sourced drivers provided by the Linux-wlan project:

http://www.linux-wlan.org/

it is also fully supported on other systems such as OpenBSD (using the native wi driver). I can ever boot an OpenBSD CD and install the system using the network install with this USB Wifi adapter. Very nice device, yet being a little bit old.

[forum1793]

I think WICD is now part of some distro packages, I'm not sure. But, will that solve anything?

I had the trendnet tew 424 which used rtl8187b. Had to use ndiswrapper. I could see networks but could not connect to wpa2 until using wicd. Nothing else worked. I was/am using slackware and luckily rworkman released a package for slackware. It worked well.

When using less than wpa2, but still using ndiswrapper, I once got a slow connection either by fiddling with rc.inet1 and/or rc.wireless, and maybe also after installing wireless-assistant.

So I'm a believer in wicd.