It’s a “dongle” with a complete WiFi system on it. Plugs in to a USB port.
You mean like this one?
I already have wifi in the house and it is working fine with Windows. How can this dongle connect to my house wifi system so I can use the Internet? I don’t understand that part.
Ypur laptop has a wifi interface in it. If linux can’t figure out hot to talk to it, you can get another interface and connect it to the laptop through USB.
Wifi used to have a lot of trouble in Linux because the manufacturers didn’t do a good job of following specifications, but windows drivers worked around a bunch of stuff. But I haven’t had a problem in years.
1 Like
I have one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/Edimax-802-11n
But if you find something else, just make sure the chipset used is supported by a driver in your Linux distribution. (Google is your friend here)
The chip in this one is a RTL8188EUS and is fairly widely supported.
I got mine running on a BeagleBone Black running Debian without too much trouble.
Just plug it in and configure the wireless network ID and password. Your Wifi access point should do the rest - give you an IP, a subnet mask, a gateway, etc, etc. and you’ll be good to go.
Cheers
What a disaster. I managed to get the system up and running with the wifi. There was no driver loaded and using the driver manager I was able to fix that. Then the wireless was turned off, fixed that also.
Next I did some testing and all seemed to be going okay so I clicked on the install button, thinking it would install on the same drive that I was using. Both the USB drive and the drive C: are the same size and type.
After it finished installing I suddenly realised that it had wiped my drive C: and had put Linux on there.
Same problem when I booted up from drive C:, no wifi connection, so I tried to use driver manager again it couldn’t find any drivers.
I ended up plugging in an ethernet cable to get on the net and then downloaded the needed driver to fix that.
Okay, so up and running again with :Linux, so now I wanted to try running some Windows programs. I downloaded Bottles and tried to download Wine, but Wine wouldn’t play the game. Bottles failed to do what I expected.
So the next step was to download a Windows 10.ISO so I could get my Windows back again. It took all last night and all of today to get up and running again with Windows, lost all my contacts and favs.
I had backups of most of my programs, so I was not too worried about them.
It has been a really good learning exercise. I guess I will sleep tonight.
Bummer. Backups are key when messing with this stuff. I hope you can find one of your contacts.
1 Like
Actually it worked out as a blessing in disguise.
I had copies of all my programs, many I didn’t actually need any more.
All my contacts were in my gmail account so I had them no problem.
I had saved almost all my saved work on another drive, so little was lost in that way.
I had a few problems that I overcame with having to format the hard drive to suit Windows and then I had to download an ISO of Windows 10 from Microsoft.
I used Ventoy software to install Windows 10 again as I didn’t have a boot disk.
Okay, it took me a night and a day to get it all back together again, but the plus is that I now have a steamlined system, that is faster, no crap on there and only the programs that I really need. Saved a lot of space and it is nice and clean.
It was well worth the mistake (but I wouldn’t like to do it again)
So tonight I have made a clone of the drive C on a spare hard drive that I can use at anytime I have a problem in the future.
Oh! I also added Classic Start Menu which I find a lot nicer than Windows menu system.
Ventoy is a great utility. I use it all the time to manage the various installers I use.
I do full install of Windows machines about once a year to try and manage bitrot.
Bummer that you had a data loss, but it’s good that your machine is running better now.
1 Like
Actually, I think I will do the same. It is so much better and faster now.
I will make it a yearly ritual.
If things don’t change too much, I can use the cloned copy to do that all automatically.
1 Like