Airlink 101 AWLL3028 $10 USB WiFi adapter works automatically with Ubuntu 8.04

If you've been using operating systems that are not Windows (but come to think of it, I've had plenty of networking problems in Windows as well), you know that getting both wired and WiFi network adapters to work in Linux, the BSDs and even Mac OS X is a crapshoot at best and prelude to weeks of often-futile hackery at worst.

The smart thing to do is figure out what works the easiest and best BEFORE you buy anything to add to your computers, especially when it comes to WiFi adapters.

The problem is that manufacturers very often won't even roll out a binary driver for Linux, and never for BSD. The number of hardware makers who provide an open-source driver is even fewer.

That leaves users either that closed-source binary driver (Linux is full of 'em; OpenBSD refuses to include them) or waiting for developers from the community to either write a driver from scratch or adapt one from another open-source project. Contrary to what you might think, developers across the BSDs share a whole lot of code, and the creation of a driver in, say, NetBSD, means that developers from the other projects will be keen to look at that code and adapt it for their flavor of OS.

It also means that older network interfaces tend to be better supported than newer ones. My Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card for 802.11b is famous for working with EVERYTHING. I haven't found a computer that has a PCMCIA slot that it won't work with. I camped out on eBay for weeks trying to get one and was finally successful. It works with my 1996-era Powerbook 1400 running System 7, my 1999-era Mac G4 running Debian Etch (but you can't close the case; and YES, Apple designed a desktop computer that uses an internal PCMCIA card, with only Apple's original Airport card [muy expensivo on eBay and 802.11b only] fitting, or so it seems), my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt and all my laptops from the first decade of the 2000s: the Gateway Solo 1450 and the two Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 models.

But I'm not hear to sing the praises of the Orinoco WaveLAN.

No, I'm here to report that good things come to those FOSS users who wait.

A couple of years ago, I spent a big $9.95 at Fry's on the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB WiFi adapter. Since the AWLL3026 was known for working in Ubuntu Linux out of the box, I figured, "What could be different between 3026 and 3028?"

A lot. They used totally different chipsets, and while the 3026 worked like a charm, the AWLL 3028 didn't work at all in Linux or the BSDs.

Sure there were lengthy forum threads about how to use ndiswrapper to make a Windows driver for the AWLL3028 work in Linux. But I could never make it work. And after a half-dozen unsuccessful attempts, I swore off of ndiswrapper for good.

When I read about the CNet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter working out of the box in both Linux and OpenBSD, I quickly bought one from Amazon.com for about $23.

It did work — and especially well in OpenBSD 4.4, which I'm no longer running. It also worked automatically in Ubuntu 8.04, which I am running at present.

But I've been getting mysterious crashes after about two to three hours of use, and only when the Cnet adapter is connected.

I remember somebody either e-mailing me or leaving a comment on one of my posts (or was it a forum thread?) to the effect that the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 did indeed work in Ubuntu 8.04 — and automatically, with no ndiswrapper needed.

After that I made a mental note, "Try the Airlink adapter already."

Well, I finally did. I plugged it into the Toshiba laptop and booted into Ubuntu 8.04.

I saw the light; the blue light that means the Airlink 101 AWLL is active (I used to get NOTHING with it connected and Linux running).

It works! I have WiFi flowing into this circa-2002 laptop from my Netgear router.

And I have the prospect of the laptop running for hours and not dying due to a WiFi adapter being connected.

And ... the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 WiFi adapter appears to still be available at $15 or less. I haven't yet researched whether or not the chipset (mine is Realtek 8187b) is the same.

Curiously, the adapter doesn't show up when I run lspci or dmesg, but it does work — and with no intervention on my part (that means automatically. I'm not as "good" with networking in Linux as I am in OpenBSD, mostly because OpenBSD's documentation is so good and networking is a major focus of the project; the man pages actually tell you how to set up a network adapter with the given chipset, and those same man pages go way beyond the usual "here's the command and a bunch of switches, good luck to you ..." I digress; if I could manage to upgrade OpenBSD without causing the install to blow up in my face, I'd probably still be running it.

Back to the topic at hand, the Airlink 101 AWLL3028.

In short, if the chipset stayed the same, at $10 to $15, the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 is an inexpensive way to add wireless networking to a computer running Linux (and more specifically the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution).