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Raspberry PI and TL-WN725N from hell

In the last few days I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to configure a seemingly simple Wifi dongle with Raspberry-pi. Being an ex-Gentoo user I thought how hard could it be to get some modules and load them, or so I thought.

First step was to install raspberry pi (I used this software to flash the image using my mac; bit dangerous with asking password for the system, but I am too lazy to look up on how to do this with console :)). I chose the rasbian distro, although arch looks more interesting.

Then of course you need to do an rpi-update, apt-get update to make sure you have the latest stuff

The module that I have does not get picked up by the kernel and I spent a lot of time downloading all kinds of module (.ko) files from the internet to get this dam wifi thing to work. It was a terribly long list of misses.  Long story short I found this link to help me get the wifi dongle  to work.

Then I used wicd-curses to configure the network. One thing that I had trouble with was using configure wifi option. The -> option is actually the right arrow. Once you select the wifi network you want to connect to, just press the right key. Also it was not possible for me to get the wifi network to route properly when it just started, so I just let it reboot, without any wired network. You can find more help  on this here.

I know why linux never really picked up. It is still not easy to get devices work out of the box.
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Location: Stockholm, Sweden

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