I have a little WiFi USB dongle. Found it at Frys for like $5.
Tried it on an Ubuntu machine about a year ago. It works.
Assuming one has an appropriate cable, and assuming one can find some
way to get power into the thing, it ought to be possible to make it work
with the Neo. (The Neo that is hopefully shipping next week, the one
without built-in WiFi.)
Assuming that all of the software interfaces used in the Neo to talk to
WiFi hardware are sufficiently general, it shouldn't be particularly
difficult to get this Neo working with this dongle. (Or any other
dongle that has open source drivers, for that matter.)
Aside from the people working on the actual drivers for the coming WiFi
Neo, people who are working on WiFi-aware apps are hopefully _not_ going
to be hard-coding things that work with the Atheros AR6K and nothing
else. So these apps could be tested on actual Neo hardware with one of
these cheap dongles added.
So maybe we could have WiFi awareness actually working before the next
phone ships in October.
Now I have recompiled a kernel before, but I've never built OpenMoko
before and I've never messed with wireless drivers either, so I don't
really have a good idea about how 'particularly difficult' it would be
to do what I just described with random cheap dongles. But I figure
there are people here who _do_ know.
It's only three months before the next phone ships. Is it worth it to
take the time to mess with dongles?
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