Well, I failed to complete one of my projects; “Build a local web server running Ubuntu Linux with LAMP and Ruby on Rails while using a wireless USB adapter(ugh) to connect to my home network.” The most important part of this project was getting a network connection through a USB adapter. Then after I established a connection I could easily configure the system as I wanted.
To do this, I had purchased a Linksys WUSB54GSC because having a wired connection is out of the question to use on my Dell Dimension box. The problem is getting USB Wireless to work on Linux takes a lot of work even with NdisWrapper which provides support for some Windows hardware, not all. Turns out, that as of recently, this USB adapter is not supported through NdisWrapper. Now while I am not a Unix or Linux guru, I am by no means a complete novice, I thought I could figure this out. Maybe I could, but it is going to take too much time for me to solve. So I had to move on.
Instead of trying to get the USB adapter working, I did what I should have from the start, use some sort of network bridge to connect my machine to the wireless network. So, for about $58, I purchased and had shipped a Linksys WGA54AG Game Adapter which can connect any game console or ethernet enabled computer to a wireless network (an idea I got from the SlingBox forums). After a simple set-up and configuration of the adapter, that is exactly what it did, with zero problems. This device needs no drivers, you simply configure it through the included software or web interface and connect your ethernet cable to the adapter and your machine and you’re set. Now I can easily move on to setting up and running a local development web server to complete my other projects. The problem of wireless on Linux is now solved. Anyone want to buy a USB WiFi adapter??
October 4th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
[...] Build a local web server running Ubuntu Linux with LAMP and Ruby on Rails while using a wireless USB adapter(ugh) to connect to my home network. failed [...]
October 5th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
That sounds like a clever solution. Drivers for linux has always been a major pain. I tried getting an old quickCam to work on my redhat install a couple times (once with RH 9 and another with FC4), but it just turns into so much work, and all dependednt very specific kernel versions. So much for the universal serial bus.
I installed my Fedora Core 4 on a machine with all kinds of flash card readers built in, so I was actually pretty surprised to discover that they actually worked. I still don’t have sound on the server, but that isn’t a priority for me now.
November 21st, 2006 at 7:24 pm
I could install the driver for WUSB54GSC on Ubuntu Dapper Drake using ndiswrapper. It’s all in the Ubuntu forums (not easy but feasible). But I failed with an iMac. Ndiswrapper is designed for intel architectures. An alternative - RNDIS - failed too. You can try it or insist a little with ndiswrapper. Check out the forum for WUSB54GS or http://www.jooz.net/rndis/ for RNDIS