If a printer, and a wifi adapter have the same chipset, can the driver from the printer be applied to the wifi adapter?

unwound · 02-17-2017, 07:45 PM

Just a point of curiosity while trying to find a driver for my wifi adapter and seeing printers that had the chipset that I searched for.

jefro · 02-17-2017, 07:52 PM

Hello and welcome to LQ.

Apples and Oranges in my opinion.

If for example you had a printer that has wifi. It also has some embedded linux on it so there might be evidence to use as a desktop driver. The problem usually is the embedded stuff isn't usable in home systems.

At one time Ndiswrapper was thought to be a way that any windows driver could be used on linux. That work fell apart when so many people were able to get linux drivers. You may be able to use a windows driver if no suitable driver exists in linux.

Did you ask about help on this chipset?

unwound · 02-17-2017, 08:37 PM

No, I ordered another adapter and I'm just doing whatever while my connection drags. I decided it was better to wait a couple of days for an adapter that was linux friendly.

jefro · 02-17-2017, 09:12 PM

Sometimes easy is the best way.

I don't follow that advice myself much.

ardvark71 · 02-17-2017, 09:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by unwound

No, I ordered another adapter and I'm just doing whatever while my connection drags. I decided it was better to wait a couple of days for an adapter that was linux friendly.

Hello and welcome to the forum

Let us know how it goes. If you need additional help with either wireless adapter, please ensure the adapter is plugged in and then open a terminal and run these commands...

Code:

wget -N -t 5 -T 10 https://github.com/UbuntuForums/wireless-info/raw/master/wireless-info && \
chmod +x wireless-info && \
./wireless-info

Then post the results (or a link to them) in your next reply. Thanks!

Regards...

TB0ne · 02-18-2017, 12:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by unwound

Just a point of curiosity while trying to find a driver for my wifi adapter and seeing printers that had the chipset that I searched for.

Nope.

A good example is bluetooth. While it is a 'standard', notice that the devices will identify themselves differently (headset, audio, computer, phone, etc.) While they all could use the same bluetooth hardware, the device itself is driven by firmware, which sets the capabilities of the device.

You've probably noticed some 'open wifi' spots, that identify as HP printers, but can't connect to them, right? Because while they are using wifi chipsets, what's behind the curtain won't do things like be a DHCP server, router/bridge, etc...the kinds of things you need to get out to the network.