I’m looking for a wireless usb stick for my computer. I’d like it to work with WPA, WEP, and WPA2. I was looking at a Rosewill RNX-N180UBE, but I could find any information on how well it worked with openSUSE. Thanks in advance!
I have found a place that lets you look at the known wireless devices and if they work with Linux. You will notice a button at the bottom that says complete listing. Press it and wait a while then you can look up the device.
Linux wireless LAN support http://linux-wless.passys.nl
What you have is a manufacturer, a model number and a chipset listing and if it is known to work. What I find is that while you can find the company that made it and a model number, versions of the chipset may be hard to determine at the store and it is likely you will be buying the very most recent release of any device and chipset, which is more likely to not yet be supported. It is tough to know for sure what you are buying until you hook it up to your computer.
Thank You,
On 11/13/2010 11:36 PM, caf4926 wrote:
>
> Check the replies here
> ‘USB Wireless Device that works OOTB?’ (http://tinyurl.com/23n4uog)
With USB devices, you do need to be careful. Some vendors change the chip
without changing the model number. As a result, you might get a unit reported to
work and find that it will not function even though the list says it does.
I have a suite of 4 USB devices, all of which work with Linux. In order of my
preference, they are:
An 801.11bg device is the Netgear WG111v2, which is available refurbished on
Ebay for $10.99 with free shipping. It has the Realtek RTL8187L chip and uses
rtl8187 as a driver. The transmit performance is about 18 Mb/s - not quite the
theoretical maximum of 27 Mb/s, but the Linux mainline driver does better than
the vendor driver. The firmware for this device is built in, thus no worrying
about that.
The Level One WNC-0301USB is not available on Ebay, but can be purchased new at
Amazon.com for $15.99 plus shipping, also uses driver rtl8187. It has the
Realtek RTL8187B chip, and works out of the box without external firmware. The
current driver has a transmit performance of ~11 Mb/s, but fixes have just been
submitted that take it to the full 27 Mb/s of 802.11g.
An 802.11abg device is the Dell Wireless 1450 available used on Ebay for $19.99
with $8 shipping. If the ability to use the 5 GHz band is important, then this
is a good device using the p54usb driver. The firmware is external and not a
standard part of Linux, but readily available.
A newer 802.11n device is the D-Link DWA-130, available refurbished on Ebay for
$12.49 with free shipping. This one uses the r8712u driver. As this driver first
appears in kernel 2.6.37, it is not available with standard openSUSE 11.3. This
kernel may be standard in 11.4, but a driver is available through Packman for
11.3. The firmware is built into the driver. With this device, I have gotten
transmit rates of ~70 Mb/s on a 150M link.
If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer.