A Wireless USB Dongle That Works!

[AMCdan]

As a ham-fisted newbie, I spent about 6 weeks this past winter trying to make a "Ralink" wireless dongle work with Antix. I originally bought it because it was said to have worked with Ubuntu. I never did get it working with Antix, though it does work with other Linux distros. This all taught me a valuable leason. Trying to configure a piece of equipment to work with a particular flavor of Linux when it won't naturally can be a daunting and frustrating task for even the most experienced Linux user. My advice (at least for newbies like myself) is to just move on - either to another piece of equipment, or a different distro. After all those weeks of frustration, I stumbled across an "SMC" model SMCWUSB-N2 (802.11N) wireless dongle on Amazon. Customer reviews said it worked with a variety of Linux distros, and as I've tried it with at least a couple dozen, I can honestly say it hasn't let me down yet! I was so pleased, I later purchased an "SMC" wireless router to replace my aging "D-Link" that was giving me some problems. This stuff is truly plug-n-play which was well appreciated by this total newbie. I've seen many posts on other forums asking for info to get a wireless dongle working, and this is the closest thing to a universal answer I know of. There may be a Linux flavor or two it won't work with, but I've yet to find it. If I can save just one other newbie all those weeks of frustration, I'll have earned my place in Heaven...

[oz]

Hello, welcome aboard, and thanks for the heads up!

[MASONTX]

I too had a Ralink USB that I struggled with, then when Ubuntu 10.10 came out, the driver was included in the kernal. Sometimes the answer is "It will work, with the next kernal update."

[gruven]

I have and am using a RaLink usb dongle for wireless, but it was nowhere near easy to set up until I finally figured out the drivers it needs.

Sure, it works in some distributions plug and play, but most I have to rebuild the kernel to add staging drivers. The official in-kernel drivers suck for it.

It is nice though, because the open source drivers from RaLink come on the disk, and you can compile them right there. They work perfectly, but I find the staging drivers in kernel work just as well, and I would rather just recompile my kernel than add software (strange, I know).

I have found that the Atheros chipset is the easiest to get working (IMO). I still have a 6 - 8 year old atheros pci wireless G card working in my server and it connects just like it was wired. These RaLink cards I have however, do not and they are N cards. They are even flaky in Windows. If I could find a good Atheros based usb dongle that wasn't expensive, I would grab a few of them.

Oh, the usb dongle I am using is the Asus USB-N13 and it is actually more stable in Linux than Windows, and is working quite well with the 2.6.39 kernel staging drivers for the RT2870/RT3070 chipset. The card itself is a RT3070 chipset.