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Suggestions for USB Wi-Fi device

DISCUSSION Larry Finger 3 participants 3 messages Feb 13, 2008 – Feb 14, 2008

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The motherboard on my notebook has failed so that my BCM9311 can no longer be accessed. The machine is under warranty, but I will be moving around for the next two months and it will not be repaired until April. In the interim, I am thinking about acquiring a USB wi-fi device. If you are using such a device and it works out-of-the-box on Linux, please send me the make and model. If this model comes with different chips, please tell me what I need.

Larry

#1 lore raw
Quoted 5 lines · Larry Finger

The motherboard on my notebook has failed so that my BCM9311 can no longer be accessed. The machine is under warranty, but I will be moving around for the next two months and it will not be repaired until April. In the interim, I am thinking about acquiring a USB wi-fi device. If you are using such a device and it works out-of-the-box on Linux, please send me the make and model. If this model comes with different chips, please tell me what I need.

Look for Level One WNC-0301USB. There are several revisions, but I checked the Windows drivers, and all appear to have corresponding Linux
drivers: rt73usb, rt2500usb, rtl8187 and zd1211rw.

My device is revision v3. It's supported by rt73usb driver and works in Fedora 8 out-of-box (at least with their updated current kernel).

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Regards,
Pavel Roskin
#2 lore raw
Quoted 10 lines · On Thursday 14 February 2008 02:12:25 Pavel Roskin wrote:
Quoted 5 lines · Larry Finger

The motherboard on my notebook has failed so that my BCM9311 can no longer be accessed. The machine is under warranty, but I will be moving around for the next two months and it will not be repaired until April. In the interim, I am thinking about acquiring a USB wi-fi device. If you are using such a device and it works out-of-the-box on Linux, please send me the make and model. If this model comes with different chips, please tell me what I need.

Look for Level One WNC-0301USB. There are several revisions, but I checked the Windows drivers, and all appear to have corresponding Linux
drivers: rt73usb, rt2500usb, rtl8187 and zd1211rw.

If you don't need good monitor-mode capabilities, you can use a zd1211 device like the Longshine LCS-8131G3.
It works pretty good in STA mode. Monitor mode is somewhat broken. It does filter some MAC addresses in hardware.

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Greetings Michael.