What is the best USB wireless (802.11g) adapter for Linux?

I have an Ubuntu Linux system and I’m looking for a USB 802.11g adapter that won’t be a complete nightmare to set up. I’m very Linux-savvy, but have better things to do with my time than waste hours finding the right combination of driver and ndiswrapper, etc. I want something that will work easily and well. Recommendations?

I bought a Linksys WUSB54GSC compact 802.11g adapter at Best Buy yesterday, but from scanning the Web, it looks like it’s going to be a pain in the tuchis to get going, plus if I ever decide to use it with a Windows XP machine instead, it has the nasty habit of installing a DLL called GTGina.dll and a corresponding registry key that disables fast user switching in Windows XP (see Linksys FAQ entry about this issue). I just hate to vote with my dollars for a product that does sneaky things like that.

5 thoughts on “What is the best USB wireless (802.11g) adapter for Linux?

  1. Marc,
    I have used the Netgear MA111 for quite a while on various installations of ubuntu, debian and redhat. It’s pretty straightforward to set up with Ndiswrapper and I have both the drivers and full instructions if you need them.
    With most wireless dongles that I have seen it is usually just a case of blacklisting a driver or two in order to let ndiswrapper do it’s stuff. Now, which ones to blacklist? That’s where the fun begins 🙂

  2. ubuntu’s ver of ndis works
    ndiswrapper -i WUSB54G.inf
    ndiswrapper -m
    modprobe ndiswrapper
    //configure connection
    modprobe -r ndiswrapper
    modprobe -r islsm_usb
    modprobe ndiswrapper
    //No network adapters work with linux natively to
    //my knowledge

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