CentOS7 USB Wifi Recommendation
I am looking for one of those very small USB wifi adapters for the server I am working on. I am tired of dealing with the 4″ long TP-LINK
I have and for my purposes, one of those little 1cm ones would do. But which work with Linux? When I was last in the store, only the TP-LINK
said it was supported on Linux…
thanks
10 thoughts on - CentOS7 USB Wifi Recommendation
Most of the 1cm WiFi dongles have a Realtek chip. The rtl819x supports quite a few Realtek WiFi chipset
(https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/rtl819x). I have bought a few on eBay for a couple of bucks each and they worked out fine. The device is activated when plugged into an USB port
(ifconfig -a).
HTH
— Arun Khan
Just to add, the RHEL 7.3 kernel backported the wireless stack from kernel-4.7, so if a chipset is supported by kernel-4.7 then it should be supported in latest CentOS 7.
Hope that helps.
I’ve used the Edimax EW-7811Un on various flavors of Linux and BSD without problems,
https://www.amazon.com/Edimax-EW-7811Un-150Mbps-Raspberry-Supports/dp/B003MTTJOY
$8.99 USD and free shipping on Amazon.
Those have worked for me as well. Their range, however, is a third or half as much as a normal wifi device.
And CentOS-arm just moved to the 4.9 kernel!
in general, the back of a server, buried under all the cables, and right up against the metal box is a lousy place for an RF antenna…
Agree. But it is even worse: iron is the worst case to have near GHz frequency antenna: it is conductor, but not the good one, hence it will eat up RF dissipating RF energy… Be it aluminum or copper, they will be just reflecting RF, thus creating funny (“interference”) radiation pattern, but they will not dissipate RF energy. Similar “bad environment”
for RF antennae was found in macbook titanium: antenna openings were in plastic frame, the last for better paint adhesion was metallized, first layer of metal film deposited on plastic is usually nickel, which is magnetic (with poor magnetic quality at 2.4 GHz), and poorly conductive. That is why macbook titanium had worst WiFi one ever had seen in laptops.
Valeri
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Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
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My application is for a Cubieboard2 in its plastic case, sitting on my desk next to my notebook for development testing. Or in my hotel room or conference meeting ‘wireless cafe’.
Not for my production ‘rack’:
http://medon.htt-consult.com/~rgm/cubieboard/cubietower-3.JPG
and in addition, if location is a problem, you could dangle your dongle (ha ha) on the end of a short USB cable so that it isn’t right next to the computer (which generates its own RF noise).
Irrelevant to the use case I’m referring to.