Raspberry Pi – gone WiFi

I was using an older WRT54G as a client/bridge for my Raspberry Pi to my home network.  It was working OK, except it would skip and stutter when playing back MythTV streams. I didn’t think a USB dongle would prevent that, but it would be nice to replace the complexity of the router with a tiny little wifi stub.

I found the AirLink 101 Wireless 150 USB “thing”  (Model AWLL5099).  I can’t call it a “stick” because it’s not stick-like (or “sticky” as Chris Wall would have said).  It’s a teeny little stub, about 1/4″ longer than the USB plug…

But boy, does it work.  It’s single-band and 2.4GHz only, so it’s not as good as it could be, but for $16…!

With OpenElec, you can do all of the configuration from the OpenElec utility.  Boom, it works, just choose wlan0 as the network interface and enter your security info.

With Raspbian, it was a little more complex.  With the 08-19-12 installer, I needed to install a few extra packages:

sudo apt-get install wireless-tools wpasupplicant

Read through this link to learn some things about how to setup.

I was getting an error from wpa_supplicant that I couldn’t decipher.  I finally found out what the problem was by running:

wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -B

I had another Raspbian setup, but I forget how exactly I set it up, or what version installer I used… That one had all of the necessary packages installed and all I needed to do was enter the wpa_supplicant lines…  Pretty slick.