USB Wireless in Linux (Mandriva/Ubuntu)
This is about my woes with the Belkin FSD7050 USB wireless adapter with the two different distros. Now there are alsorts of theories about on how some of the Linux drivers are preferable and more stable but getting them to work is another thing, Serial Monkeys RTxxx drivers, Madwifi, Ndiswrapper, compile your own RT73 drivers, built in RT73 drivers, Prism 54 USB drivers.....the list is long and the pages and workarounds if you google the subject are many. All i want to do is plug it in and use it, with a minimum of configuration and fuss. If thats not enough to contend with, Ndiswrapper also works diferently in the two distros as well as being 'manually' configurable. Thats fine if you know the Linux command promt/terminal commands very well but not if you are one of the large number of new Linux convertees! One wrong move with the "gksudo gedit" command and you have no workable connection at all. Here goes with Mandriva first. The same result for Mandriva 2007.0 or Mandriva 2007.1 (Spring).
Plug in the USB stick either after boot up or before its booted up, it makes no difference, its listed in the KDE hardware list and doesn't have a driver assigned to it, well not in here and not yet. First move, right click on the 'connection' icon in the tray.
Clicking on 'configure network' leads you to exactly that. So i choose wireless.
Straight away it does not recognise the USB adapter, but it does prompt me to use a windows driver with Ndiswrapper.
I have the (windows)installation CD for the device and it is in the cd drive mounted and ready to go so its a simple job to direct it to the driver i need in the driver folder on the cd, i choose RT2500usb.inf
I am then prompted with another message.
Now it does not always tell you it has been configured with the prism54 driver, sometimes it just asks you if you really want to use a ndiswrapper driver. There seems to be no rationale as to why it mentions prism54 as on the same system sometimes it does and other times it doesn't. I choose yes, i want to use a ndiswrapper driver. Next thing we are up and running.
And its found my 'homenetwork'. Click 'next' and it prompts me for the encryption mode and wep key. Enter them in and away we go.
The small 'LAN' icon then changes to a signal strength meter. And it works great.
Only one downside to it and that is that everytime i reboot i have to go through the 'configure network' routine all over again although it is somewhat quicker as it has already stored a copy of the RT2500usb driver in the ndiswrapper folder so it just promts me to use it, it also stores my network configuration like ESSID and my WEP details so its a simple case of clicking next/next/next....to get it up and running again. I'm pretty sure there is a way to load the ndiswrapper at boot up so it 'auto starts' the connection. I'll ask about that on the Mandriva news group. I have no problems with the wireless connection, it never drops and its up to speed when i download stuff.
Now, lets try and get it going with Ubuntu (7.04 FF) using the same (ndiswrapper) or any other method.
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