Wireless USB dongles

[Steve B]

Hey folks,
Just wondering which wireless USB dongles generally tend to play nice with linux and have good support. Any of the main brands I should be looking out for? Doesn't need to be cutting edge kit either, just 802.11b/g.
It needs to be compatible with openWRT

Cheers,
Steve

[peterb]

It depends on the underlying chipset. There is a lot of info on the various Linux fora. A Google on something like "Linux Wireless USB" will start you in the right direction. Anything using Texas Instrument chip sets is likely to be iffy (they don't publish programming details). The difficulty is determinging which chip set the mfr has used.

This link is useful (although it deals mainly with Ubuntu, it should apply to other distros)

Murray’s Blog » Blog Archive » Linux-compatible wireless USB adaptor: Results

[Steve B]

Thanks peterb, I have a compatibility list downloaded, but it doesn't really have any information on whether the USB dongles will work with openWRT. If its compiled using the 2.6 kernel, will it be like installing a device on another linux distro with the 2.6 kernel?

[peterb]

I give a coutious yes! However we are at te limits of my direct experience/knowledge on this area. One other other option might be to download the source for openWRT and compile it on your system.

My only experience with USB dongles was with a cheap Bluetooth dongle I bought from scan, which I was pleasantly surprised to find operated as soon as I plugged it into a FC6 system without the addition of any other drivers apart from the native ones that came with the distro. Funnily enough, the cheaper and more generic the device, it seems that the more likely they are to work - possibly because they use OEM chipsets for which the OEM mfrs publish the hardwre calls so the the open source community can write the appropriate drivers.

One thing I did discover when looking at this area is that sometimes a Windows driver will operate a device on a Linux system - it after all just machine code, but I guess it depends just where and at what level it is located - again an area of about which I have only a little knowledge.