Affordable 802.11n USB dongle that IS supported in Fedora

[Tim]

Tim:
>> if USB dongles are anything like dial-up modems used to be (external
>> or internal), the chipsets used in particular models were not
>> consistent.  e.g. Out of a specific model number modem, some of them
>> could be Lucent chipsets, the rest something else.

Robert Moskowitz:
> D-link use to be very bad this way.  They would change chip set and
> not change even the product model number.  So you would go to update
> the firmware and brick your adapter.  They have since figured out that
> you really need to keep your consumer informed.

Way back when I had a brief dalliance with Win98, I had an internal
modem that came with a driver disk full of drivers for a plethora of
completely different hardware, and several different drivers for your
modem, depending on what chipset it had.  You had to look at your PCI
card to determine the chipset, because the software didn't do that for
you.  Then you had the run the right driver install from the CD-ROM.
Some of the directories were just oddball lists of letters and numbers,
with no damn clue what they were for.  All that crap just to use
something you'd bought.

The alternative was to let Windows scan through the entire disc, and see
if it could find something that suited it.  Various bits of hardware was
like that (graphics card, anything).  Sometimes it'd find nothing,
sometimes it'd fixate on the wrong thing.

I have never regretted giving Windows the heave-ho.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.