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Saudi Arabia, Riyadh
1 Level
767 Review
29 Karma

Review on πŸ“Ά Netis High Power Wireless USB Adapter, 150Mbps Network WiFi Dongle for PC/Desktop/Laptop, 802.11 b/g/n Technology, Signal Boosting Power Amplifier, Windows 10/8/8.1/7/Vista/XP, Mac OS, Linux, MTK RT3070 Chipset, N150 (WF2119S) by Tyler Fountas

Revainrating 2 out of 5

Recompile drivers? whoo boy

I have to say I was very excited when I saw that this Netis Wireless dongle was Linux compatible. I had high hopes that it would work out of the box with the ubuntu deb package. When I received the WiFi dongle, I was surprised to find that I had to compile the source code for the drivers myself. Okay, not my favorite thing to do, but I can do it. I ran into compilation errors on Ubuntu 15.04 because code used the __FILE__ and __LINE__ macros but -Wall which activated a warning in my version of gcc that you shouldn't use the file and line macros. I replaced __FILE__ and __LINE__ with some literal values and that made them disappear. The only problem was that the kernel module was removed every time I updated the Linux kernel, causing problems. Excellent. However. It's still not too painful to run the magic install.sh script and get everything working. Then I upgraded to Ubuntu 15.10 and found a major bug. A kind of global buffer called file_path was declared in the code, which now conflicted with the function signature received from the included library. I had to go through all occurrences of file_path and change it to file_path_buf. After that I noticed that some android routines use strnicmp which is not included in the dependencies. I fixed this by writing my own code to convert strings to uppercase. It's working again now, but it's kind of ridiculous. It's the kind of Linux user experience I've heard legends from old engineers about. I didn't think I would "live the dream" this way. The hardware seems to be good. A thing works once its drivers are built and installed. But it's a recurring support headache. If you're using Linux, save yourself the trouble.

Pros
  • Satisfied so far
Cons
  • Very expensive