I’ve been playing a lot with wireless this week. I remembered we had a D-Link USB wireless thing at work, so I plugged it in my desktop and played around with it to see if I could get it working. Amazingly, I actually got it up and running within about 10 minutes with ndiswrapper. I was pretty impressed. So, I went out and bought one for me after work.
The thing I found out about it after I got home is that mine is a different revision, and so it’s a different chipset. Surprise! The cool thing though is that I happened to get one where you can use ndiswrapper or some beta oss drivers from the manufacturer (rt2x00).
Well, silly me, I figured I’d have this one up and running in 15 minutes or less at home, since by now I’m a seasoned wireless Linux user. That was over six hours ago. I still can’t get the thing to even work without a kernel segfault, and for some reason I keep trying. The really great part of all of this is I’ve tried eight kernels all on my Pentium 3, and it just now occurred to me that it might be faster if I was testing this on my speedy amd64 desktop. Whoops.
Anyway, I’m sure to get this working eventually. That, or my head will implode. Right now, it’s a tough call.
Save your sanity. Return/sell/ditch that one and get a card that works natively in linux. Something with a prism54 chipset or zd1201 chipset (for just B) will make you really happy.
NDISWrapper rarely works well, and often doesn’t even work well enough to get by. But it’s a great thing to have for built-in wireless cards. There’s no need to experience that pain when using an external device.
rt2x00 won’t work on an smp or preempt kernel. I beat my head against this for 2 weeks on my shiny new laptop before discovering this. Hope this helps.