That is one of the problems with buying a random card. 'Going cheap' isn't
going cheap. It ultimately costs more because the information you have isn't
reliable.
It's better to group together to reduce costs in the long run. We're working
with Atheros on a new chipset although the USB adapters are going to cost a
fortune to manufacture. It's not so bad on per card basis although the
initial purchase multiplied by thousands of cards adds up even at a fraction
of price.
We are looking at probably at least 5-6 months before the new chipset will be
in a USB dongle and available... and possibly longer until Trisquel has out
of the box support. Just manufacturing them will take 3 1/2 months.
I'd actually recommend the RTL8187B chipset over the AR9170 chipset. While
the prior is not as feature rich or as fast the chipset works better for
typical desktop use. The benefits of the AR9170 chipset is you can setup an
access point with it. Although I'd probably go with a PCIe if I were going to
setup an access point anyway.
