poor quality of usb wifi adapters is a common complaint online, and also a problem that I personally have experienced on a $20 gadget. This makes me wonder, so how much do the high quality wifi adapters that we have inside our laptops cost? And why doesn’t the maker of these proven built-in adapters sell an exernal usb version of them under the slogan “if it works inside the laptop, it will surely work outside of it”?
Do a Google image search for “internal wifi antenna.”
Those internal wifi cards have long antennas that wind througout the insides and that helps reception. People don’t want big long wires hanging off their USB adapters.
oh, so the entire problem is purely a matter of size and not price?
Incidentally, an unrelated question from the same general area. I notice that “wireless driver missing” is a problem experienced by many people. I have experienced it on a few occasions due to reinstalling the OS from the wrong disk. I also notice that these external usb wifi adapters come with their own drivers inside, presumably stored in ROM memory. They even work with all the different operating systems, when they work at all in the first place.
Well, so why don’t the makers of the internal laptop wifi adapter similarly put the driver into permanent ROM memory that would be unaffected by OS reinstalls and connect the adapter via usb interface (if that’s not how it is already connected anyway), so that there would be no further driver related problems?
Yeah, the little wireless card inside the laptops isn’t much different than a USB wireless card’s circuitry, but they have an antenna that’s pretty big winding around inside the case that plugs into a little port on the circuit board. The last laptop I took apart, with an 802.11b/g card, had an antenna that was a couple feet long winding around the outside edge of the bottom half of the clamshell.
Wow, I’ve never had a USB network adapter, wireless or not, that included its own drivers on the device. I’ve always had to install from a CD. (Although now, Windows 7 seems to have drivers for almost everything built in, so that’s a plus.)
I would think that for such a thing to be possible, the device would also have to show up as a disk drive when you plug it in (in Windows) or be mounted (in Linux). Have you seen that happen?
the (sucky) gadget I have right now worked on both Windows and Ubuntu just by plugging it in. I see similar claims on Amazon reviews for other such gadgets, that essentially people just plugged them in and it worked.
BTW, some extra research indicates that the prices for these gadgets dropped quite a bit over the past months. I have just ordered a fancy looking gadget with a big antenna for $11, which hopefully will work better than my current $25 overheating gadget without antenna. I guess economic crisis is driving down the exorbitant prices closer to reality, or something like that.
I have one now, a Netgear wg111, and it’s not mounted in (Slackware) Linux. It just shows up as a usb device. Hate the thing, it gets 80% signal strength 6 feet from the router and download speeds suffer, but I have everything being shipped to run cat5 through the whole house so I have to live with it for a few more days.
They’re probably using “generic” drivers that come with the OS.
Does Ubuntu not come with bundled drivers like Windows does? Even generic ones?
If you didn’t know, when you plug something in to Windows and it “just works” it’s not because the driver is stored in the device, it’s because Windows has a driver stored for it already. Sometimes a device will work with some other thing’s pre-installed driver, or will work with a generic driver that Windows has.
My printer needed all sorts of software with Windows XP. The same printer doesn’t even have a downloadable driver to work with Windows 7, because 7 has the drivers already.
got it, thanks for fighting my ignorance. So I guess Windows and Ubuntu come with generic drivers for all sorts of things - except for the laptop’s native wireless adapter 
. Maybe that’s the laptop wireless adapter’s manufacturer’s fault, in that they did not use the generic driver?
Well, it’s not just generic drivers. Windows does store drivers for specific products.
Most Dells I’ve worked with required me to go to the Dell website, find the specific model of machine I was working on and download a heap of drivers if I wanted to put a non-Dell copy of Windows on a Dell machine. Otherwise I’d be left without sound, ethernet, CD ROM, etc. Oh, and you also get to guess which component your model may or may not have while it’s sitting dead on the floor.
But, Dell isn’t building the components and failing to use drivers that Windows already has. It’s putting together a bunch of components from various vendors - some name-brand, some Dell-commissioned - and doing it as cheaply as possible. It provides you the means to get all the drivers you need. Sometimes it puts them on a partition. This is really how it’s always worked.
Being able to plug in something and just have it work is becoming more frequent as storage gets cheaper and Windows installs can be bigger. Otherwise, it’s perfectly normal to have to go out and find a driver or install a driver from a CD.
Remember, being able to work with almost any hardware configuration you can think of is the beauty of Windows. It’s what makes it Not Apple.
Because that would cost them money and no one really gives much of a shit. The drivers stored in ROM would quickly go out of date, and could not support new operating systems anyway.
A lot of wifi adapters don’t work under linux because the manufacturers refuse to release the specs of their adapters to you unless you sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). NDAs keep information private and that doesn’t work with the open source concept of linux. More and more wifi adapters are working under linux these days, so I don’t know if the wifi manufacturers are starting to get a bit more open regarding technical info about their adapters or if the folks who write linux device drivers are just getting better at reverse engineering things without specs.
I haven’t looked into the details of any of them, but I suspect a USB wireless adapter is going to show up as a much more generic network interface to linux and could therefore use a more common generic USB network interface driver.
The reason they don’t put drivers in the device is that is not the USB standard.
I can’t help thinking that the idea that you computer automatically installs drivers from whatever piece of crap you plug into your computer is an incredible security hole. I have seen stories about malware installed via usb sticks plugged into computers with auto run turned on. Even if the drivers are not automatically installed, it seems a really bad idea to train people to click OK to what ever pops up when you plug in a USB device.
I don’t think there’s a generic Linux driver. They either work because the chipset is supported by the kernel or they’re using a windows driver with ndiswrapper.
in my latest question I did not mean installing drivers from a usb device (even though presumably with the right sandboxing it could be handled correctly by OS; hypothetically). What I meant was protecting the drivers associated with the built-in device, like built-in wifi adapter inside the laptop, from loss due to OS reinstall. And not just Ubuntu install - I once had a case where installing Windows wiped out the driver as well. If I were smarter at the time I would have backed up drivers, yadda yadda, but then how much money would it have cost to put in a built-in flash memory to do such driver backups automatically for the not-so-smart people? Flash memory is cheap even by the gigabyte, and AFAIK drivers are pretty small.
Of course, at the time of manufacture Dell could store both Windows and Linux drivers for that particular device into such hypothetical flash backup. Then if in practice the driver wouldn’t work (maybe the next Linux build broke compatibility) the user would have been directed to start jumping through hoops looking for the new drivers online.
I don’t see how it’s a security hole if the disk drive was readonly.
The entire problem with autorun is bad software being installed on the device. And, honestly, I think it’s overkill that they removed it entirely instead of making it opt in or something.
No, the problem with autorun definitely exceeds that. Allowing arbitrary software to run risks compromising all data in your user account or even your entire computer if you’re an administrator.
Programs autorun from USB drives have the same privileges as programs run from anywhere else by the same user. They are not limited to the thumb drive itself.
Nothing besides stamped CD and DVDs are read only anymore. Every little electronic device has programmable memory it in some where. There are numerous examples of things like cheap flash drives, LCD photo frames etc. coming from the manufacture with malware that will infect your computer if you have auto run on. Training people to install whatever driver is presented when you plug a USB thing in is a bad bad bad idea.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-01-26/news/17149112_1_digital-photo-infected-frames