If anyone reading this has had any success configuring a USB wlan card under Linux I would benefit greatly from hearing your story. Could you post a quick summary of the steps taken?

What distro/kernel version/kernel patches used?

Did you use ndiswrapper/wlan-ng/or other drivers?

Did it work the first time you tried?

Did you have to deviate from the install instructions very much?

Did you have to unplug the card while Linux was booting and/or plug it in at any certain step? (I've heard that's been helpful in many cases from certain guides, no actual testimony though)

Any issues (failure on reboot/occasional disconnection)?

Anything else of note?

I've heard a lot of success from PCI/PCMCIA users, not many USB stories though and I'm sure they're out there.

Thanks!

Ike

As for myself, I have a Microsoft MN-710 card (supposedly Prism chipset) and I have been struggling for a while to even get the lights on in Slackware 9.1 or Fedora Core 2, even though 'lsusb' lists the device.

I had the wlan driver working with a prism2 USB device on RH9 (but now I've moved to Fedora Core 2 and am currently experiencing problems).

On RH9 all I had to do was run "make oldconfig" in the kernel source directory ( /usr/src/linux* ) and then I went ahead and ran through the steps in the README file, compiling the modules and such.

I did have to unplug and replug the device, insert /sbin into the path, and then run rc.local into which I had inserted the code from the README file:

modprobe prism2_usb
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=default authtype=opensystem
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.150 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast <yourBroadcast>
route add default gw 192.168.1.1


Now I'm having problems with FC2, I've had to compile and install a new kernel, and everything seemed to work fine, but when I run

wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable

I get a "wlanctl-ng: No such device" error. Really annoying.

Hope this helps.

-Dave Z.