all this and a dongle, too!

I finally got my usb wireless nic working in Gentoo. The solution? Emerge the stable packages with a good kernel. It’s always the situation you try last that works.

Even though ndiswrapper is far from the best optimal solution for wireless in linux, I’m gonna hang onto my purchase for one perfectly good reason – the stick came with this cool little USB extension cradle called a dongle.

You see, the dongle saves us from seeing some nerd bend over his computer while plugging in his 5 gigabyte USB memory stick into the back of his computer. Now they can just comfortably hotplug the hardware from their seat.

Whoever invented these cradles did us all a favor, and I’d like to think my investment of $52.13 goes towards thanking them personally.

Thanks for the comments on the last post, though. Hans is absolutely right — I shouldn’t put myself through the pain. I would like to find something 802.11g, either PCI or USB that I can stick in my desktop and will work natively with Linux, but as far as my reasearch has gone, the scenario still looks a little bleak. It’s especially frustrating when someone says, “Oh, just get FooCard whatever … but make sure its revision 13f,” or something like that.

Beyond that problem, I’m still absolutely paranoid about even getting any computer on my subnet at home on a permanent wireless connection at all. I’m afraid that my wireless traffic will either get easily sniffed, or someone will get into my subnet through the router and setup ARP poisioning (thanks a lot for the demo, Scott).

I’m going to get a Linksys WRT54GL pretty soon here, slap OpenWRT on that baby, and then start playing around with it. Once I learn some stuff, I’m sure I won’t be nearly as frightened out of my mind. 🙂