Anders Carlsson: Hardware Hunt

January 17, 2005

Hardware Hunt

I'm in search for a good USB Wireless Dongle that works under Linux 2.6 with the 12" PowerBook G4. I got the Netgear MA111 one but it turned out to be a new version that used a totally different chipset (which only has a binary x86 driver...)

Anyway, don't hesitate to comment if you know any good dongles!

That will be all...

Posted by Anders Carlsson at January 17, 2005 10:35 AM

Comments

I'm also in the market for one of these. But is seems there isn't any support in linux for them yet. Although the madwifi folks has showed intress in adding support for the Atheros based ones (WG11U, WG11T). What chipset does the MA111 use?

Posted by: Johan Svedberg at January 17, 2005 10:59 AM

Hello :)

I have the Netgear MA111 and got it working using ndiswrapper and the supplied windows driver under 2.6.

You will need ndiswrapper 0.11 and above for WEP support, though I couldn't get it working with a passphrase.

Hope this helps.

Posted by: Nermal at January 17, 2005 11:00 AM

Nermal, it doesn't help because ndiswrapper is x86 only. The PowerBook uses a ppc CPU.

Posted by: Anders Carlsson at January 17, 2005 11:02 AM

Doh. Good point. And there was me feeling all helpful :(

Any reason you don't want to use an airport card ?

Posted by: Nermal at January 17, 2005 11:16 AM

I used the D-link DWL-120. Unfortunately, none of these USB wireless gadgets are support by default by the latest linux kernel. So, I my case I useed the ATMEL drivers( http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/), which works more or less.

Posted by: Stephan Michels at January 17, 2005 12:01 PM

Anders: Airport Extreme doesn't work on linux, either :)

Posted by: Colin at January 17, 2005 12:22 PM

Even the "correct" MA111 kinda sux, it uses the wlan-ng drivers which can not be configured with the iw* tools.

Which leads to custom configuration scripts, and NetworkManager doesnt work with these devices either.

I'm in the same boat, my Ibook G4 has no PCMCIA so PCMCIA is out, and I cant use ndiswrapper due to architecture issues.

When you find one that -works-, can you blog it.. I'm interested in finding knowing the answer to this.

Posted by: Wade Mealing at January 17, 2005 12:35 PM

The Conceptronic Wireless 54 MBps USB 2.0 dongle uses the rt2500 chipset, which has a completely open sourced driver, rt2x00. This means you don't need any binary driver/firmware to get it work, so (in theory) you could use it on PPC. The problem is that the rt2x00 doesn't have USB support yet. It's expected to be included in the first release of the unified rt2400/rt2500 driver, rt2x00. You can follow this development in http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com

Posted by: Felipe Ortega at January 17, 2005 05:28 PM

I'm using a sweex dongle on my ibook with this driver : http://linux-lc100020.sourceforge.net/. Unfortunately, it's 11Mb/s.

Posted by: benja at January 18, 2005 03:25 AM