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USB WLAN on Xubuntu 13.10

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In order to connect my old desktop PC (now connected to TV screen), I had to buy either a long ugly CAT cable, buy two powerline adapters or buy a WLAN adapter. I decided to go for a wireless USB adapter.

Linux users know that buying hardware can be a pain as many consumer devices do not have proper drivers for Linux (yet). So the first thing I did was searching for compliant USB WLAN adapters. The german Ubuntuusers Wiki has a good page about WLAN cards and USB sticks. In the end there were not many "hard" recommendations I found, so I tried it the other way around: browsing the local PC store I checked every stick for compatibility.

In the end I bought the Belkin N300 Wireless USB Adapter (F7D2101QDE) for 14.99 EUR at my local store. The F7D2101QDE has a RTL8192SU chipset and works out of the box on my Xubuntu 13.10 (I haven't upgraded to 14.04 yet as network connectivity was missing ;-)).

I feared the hassle with Linux drivers, but my new USB WLAN adapter works like a charm. I just had to enter the WPA2 key and was ready to go. After doing a fairly big Xubuntu upgrade (13.10 to 14.04) via the Belkin adapter, I cannot see any issues (like connection drops) so far.