The Roswill RNX-N180UBE works right out of box and has antenna extension cable and base of course its N.
I just followed the tutorial on installing Gnome network-manager so cli isn’t needed every time.
cheep at newegg

Thanks for sharing, it works very good
nice WLAN Stick with ext. antenna and without powered USB hub? I need this stick too

I have this stick, works very well with Linux but this stick need a powered usb hub:
http://www.bazoo.eu/multimedia/index.php?we_objectID=298

Still unsolved… how to get the thing to automatically reconnect when the signal is dropped. That works if I use “Network Manager” inside of X11, but I’m really hoping eventually to deploy these little RPis as little “agents” — embedded computers that will run headless and be managed by ssh’ing into them.

So, I want them to connect to a certain Wifi network on boot, and persistently try to reconnect (and re-up the DHCP lease) any time they lose that connection. This solves the “connect on boot”, but the connection is lost, it stays lost.

I could write my own daemon to check the health of the connection and bring it up back—-but something tells me that’s the wrong way to do it—-i.e. that it is likely that wpasupplicant *is* the daemon that should be doing that, and perhaps it already can, f only I knew how to configure it to do so.

Awesome! Thanks for keeping us updated! I’m sure this will help many others, as well as myself, as like I said, I’ve still yet to get wifi on my 2nd pi.

You Rock!

Never mind… figured it out!

Here are details for anyone else that might be trying the script above, and running into problems.

As far as I can figure out, the RFKILL thing was a red herring.

The real problems were:

(1) (duh…) I had a typo in the SSID in my wpa_supplicant.conf
(2) the next one was more subtle:

instead of:

network={
ssid=”YOURSSID”
psk=”YOURPASSWORD”
}

I had to run the following command:

wpa_passphrase YOURSSID YOURPASSWORD

and then take the output and copy/paste it into my wpa_supplicant.conf, e.g.

network={
ssid=”YOURSSID”
#psk=”YOURPASSWORD”
psk=some_long_string_of_hex_not_in_quotes
}

I had assumed, since I tried my password not in quotes and it rejected it as “not in the right format”, that it was automatically doing the translation, but that was not the case.

(3) These next steps might or might not have been necessary—-they were fumbling around in the dark before I finally changed the psk to the hex number generated by wpa_passphrase (which is the last thing I did before it worked.)

Knowing that I was using WPA2, I also put in some things I found on various websites, such as:

scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA RSA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
auth_alg=OPEN

I don’t know if any or all of those are needed… later when I have more patience and time, I might try removing them one at a time and see if it breaks. (If anyone is following in my footsteps here, one caution: there is no underscore between WPA and RSA… or CCMP and TKIP… those really are spaces.)

One debugging technique that was helpful was one I got from this page:

https://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/Debugging

This was relevant because I knew that my WIFI connection was working perfectly with the “NetworkManager” program in the GUI (the one referred to on that page.) So by turning on the debugging for that, I was able to see some of the low level details of what things looked like when there was a _successful_ connection. That was somewhat helpful in figuring out what was wrong.

For this walk through I was using the recommended Raspbian release, as I figured it would benifit the largest amount of people, however I’m also running an Arch Linux build, which I’m guessing you are as well being rfkill is an arch package.

I’ll make another guide soon for getting wifi working on arch, so hang tight, or if you get this figured out before I do, Please feel free to post your experience and steps you took or at least a link to a post you’ve made here as well!

Nice article. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me… I got these errors:

rfkill: Cannot open RFKILL control device
ioctl[SIOSCIWAP]: Device or resource busy
ioctl[SIOSCIWESSID]: Device or resource busy

I did an strace on the wpasupplicant command and it appears it is trying to access /dev/rfkill which doesn’t exist in my build. What build are you using?