I don’t know why, but I seem to be good at buying hardware that works well with Linux. My friends have (brand spanking new) PC’s that won’t even load an Ubuntu live CD, yet I have two laptops that work great, straight out of the box. Yesterday I went to Tesco and purchased myself a Philips SNU 5600. Just found it all alone on a shelf and a quick phone google showed it had a native driver (zd1211rw).. And there I was thinking i’d never find a USB Wifi adaptor that would just work.
So I went home, dug out my NSLU2 and booted it up. I run Debian on it with a 2.6.21 kernel, so all I had to do was install the firmware (apt-get install zd1211-firmware) and plug it in.
I had a slight moment of fear though:
SoftMAC: Open Authentication with XX:XX:Xx:XX:XX:XX failed, error code: 12
A bit of kernel grepping later: Turns out that error 12 is WLAN_STATUS_ASSOC_DENIED_UNSPEC, and my router was set to only let known MAC addresses connect! Doh!
So now I have a wireless linux box tucked away in the wardrobe, serving my OGGs to anyone of my devices thats interested… Now to setup streaming to my smartphone!
