[lug] USB wireless

[Nate Duehr]

On Sep 11, 2008, at 6:37 PM, gordon.golding at colorado.edu wrote:

>
> I thought I posted this before but then didn't see it....   %-{
>
> I have a bunch of PCs I need to set up for wireless.  It seems  
> SOOOOO much easier to buy those little USB wireless plug-ins.
>
> Does anybody have comments?  In a low-signal environment are they  
> useless?  How much worse than the cards with antennae?


They seem to work fine, as long as you stay within relatively  
reasonable distances from the Access Point.  I have a Belkin on a  
Windows machine that works fine.  Too lazy to run cabling around the  
baseboards in that room from where the router/switch is.

In the past I've had a couple of the "cards with antennae" and wasn't  
super impressed with them.  The drivers were flaky to get installed on  
some machines as I moved them around, had virtually no Linux support,  
and generally weren't "happy".  The best way to do Linux 802.11 that I  
ever found in a desktop machine was a REAL PCMCIA port that you  
stuffed in a drive bay and stuck the card in a slot... then put a  
normally supported PCMCIA 802.11 card that had Linux support in the  
card slot on the front.  Worked real well.  But they're hard to find  
nowadays.

That might be different if I were trying to do 802.11n -- those  
devices need the extra antennas for diversity receive.  I have a mixed  
802.11b/g network here.  Various devices.

One serious warning here... since this is a Linux list.  Not a whole  
lot of the USB dongle things have any Linux support.  You'll want to  
do your homework to find some that do if you're talking about using  
them with Linux.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com