[dimbmw]

Hi
I've installed linuxcnc on a pc without a wifi and having troubles adding a wi-fi usb dongle.
I lean towards reinstalling the whole thing with the usb dongle plugged in (it wasn't), so that debian detects it and installs the drivers.
I need a recommendation on which usb wifi dongles are natively supported and will be detected at installation.
Thanks!

[ozzyrob]

Hi,

I recently just walked a member of the Linuxcnc forum getting a USB dongle going with a more or less recent version.

https://forum.linuxcnc.org/pathpilot...iable-usb-wifi

No need to reinstall........The member in question couldn't get wifi going during installation, but no biggie. The real meat of the answer is the last page or so, the thread is interceded with questions regarding a dying SSD.

Have a look over yonder and if you need any help I'm always happy to help.

The cause of the problem, according to "the word on the street" is that some of the firmwares have trouble with the recent Linux network naming convention, as you'll see from the above mentioned thread, it's a simple fix to get the "older naming convention" and to get things going.

dmesg and lsub are the commands that really help debugging this issue.

[RickyBurton]

If all else fails just pick up and wifi dongle that is compatible with the Debian wheezy os, many years playing with Linux and the drivers are always an issue but they are getting better.

wifi compatibility

But not sure how they will affect the RT Kernal.

[ozzyrob]

The issue is some of the realtek firmwares (maybe others) have trouble with the "new" longer naming scheme for network interfaces on newer kernels. The driver will load but it's the firware for the dongle that seems to be the issue. So even if you do grab a compatible dongle it may not work due to the naming scheme.

Adding these options to the kernel command line, net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0 goes back to "old" shorter naming scheme for network interfaces, added benefit is that the LAN interfaces go back to eth0, eth1 and so on. After that it's all easy peasy.....a lot of the cheaper ebay dongles use a realtek chip......I think I picked up 4 for the pricely sum of AUD $3.00 a piece delivered.