Straight up, as for dongles i've actually used, Netgear ones are reasonably good. I've got a MA111 using the prism2_usb driver and it works well.
Your best bet is to find a cheap dongle, Google for the chipset, and buy appropriately. The chipsets you'll most likely come across when you buy a dongle are manufactured by the likes of Broadcom, Atmel, and Ralink. Prism chipsets are by far the most common, however you will the Atmel and Ralink chipsets pop up here and there. Broadcom's are found in a wide range of Belkin dongles. I'd be angling for either a Ralink or Prism-based dongle. The Ralink drivers are open source, and the Prism2/2.5/3 cards are supported by the linux-wlan-ng project. I've recently played with the Ralink and Prism drivers and they're reasonably good, although the prism2_usb driver does not properly implement the Wireless Extensions, meaning you'll have to communicate with the firmware through the wlanctl-ng command. I have not tried the Ralink USB driver, but i'd guess that the quality would be top-notch considering their PCI/PCMCIA/MiniPCI drivers. I used some of the original Atmel drivers, but they were a pain in the arse. Last year I got a hold of a Belkin PCI card that used the Atmel chipset and was pleasantly suprised at the improvement of the quality of the driver. No idea about their USB chips, sorry. Broadcom are bastards and refuse to release specs of any of their chips. The bcm43xx project have done some great work in reverse engineering the MiniPCI and PCMCIA chipsets, although there's no plan to support any of the USB dongles in the future. Anyway, enough of my waffling. Good luck! Lindsay On 6/21/06, Peter Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm looking for a USB WiFi doohickey (my laptop has Express Card 34, not a PCMCIA slot). Do sluggers know of any pain-free USB Wifi whatsits that work on Linux? My system is Ubuntu Dapper. I've tried ndiswrapper with little success, and it can't do monitor mode (or whatever it's called) for Kismet, anyway. I'd like a USB wifi thingie with a Linux driver, if possible.
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