[PLUG-TALK] USB WiFi

[Bill Barry]

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
>   Has anyone practical experience with USB WiFi 'thumbs'? I see that newegg
> has one available, but all the reviews are by Winduhs users.
>
>   Do these have more powerful radios than the PCMCIA card adapters? Might
> they work when the pcmcia card sees access points, but dhcpcd doesn't return
> an IP address? What linux drivers are needed?
>

Rich,
    First, a philosophical question. Is it ok to post On-topic things
in the Off-topic list?

    One thing has solved several of my wireless access problems. I
configured  my power management to suspend the wireless drivers and
restart them on resume. If your distribution uses the pm-utils for
power management this is done by including the wireless driver in the
file /etc/pm/config.d/wireless   This file consists of a single line
SUSPEND_MODULES="b43"
where b43 is the module for the Broadcom wifi in my laptop.

Before I did this it was hit or miss whether I could connect to an
access point, but after that change I have not had any problems.

Bill