Wireless Adapters on Android

GoogleGroups
1

When running "make menuconfig", I see the following wireless drivers
are available:

Marvell Libertas 8388 USB 802.11b/g cards
Marvell Libertas 8385 and 8686 SDIO 802.11b/g cards
USB ZD1201 based Wireless device support

After some research, I find this information:

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/libertas
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/libertastf

None of which is particularly helpful in locating a suitable USB wifi
adapter.

Question #1: Has anyone been successful at getting any USB wifi
adapter to work on Android with the BeagleBoard? If so, which device
was it?

Question #2: If no suitable USB wifi adapter exists for those chipsets
listed above, is it possible to manually add support for another
chipset, such as zd1211?

zd1211 seems to be a very common chipset, and here is a list of
devices that uses it:

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/zd1211rw/devices

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks...

-Stan

2

Nobody?

3

Hi Stan,

I don't think there is a lot of Android hackers here, but if they've
enabled it in the kernel. I've had good luck with the 2 Realtek based
RTL8187's adapters i own in angstrom/debian/ubuntu's 2.6.29 kernel..

Regards,

4

Which Android kernel are you using?

I have not tried yet but i'm planning to use "D-Link DWL-G122 USB WiFi
Adapter" on Android 2.6.27-10 kernel.
It works well on ubuntu-2.6.27 kernel with rt73usb driver. So I'm
assuming it may work on Android too.

Regards
Amit Pundir

5

I'm using the following kernel image: Linux-2.6.29-omap1-07176-g57a557

Unless there are already some drivers for wifi adapters built into the
kernel by default and not listed in menuconfig, then I don't think
that adapter will work on Android even though it works with Ubuntu. I
assume that Ubuntu has the driver for it built-in, but not so with
Android.

Let me know if you find otherwise...

Thanks...

-Stan

6

Android linux-2.6.27.10-omap1 kernel has that driver(rt73usb) support
in it but I'm not sure if it is there in Android 2.6.29 kernel. It
should be there though.

You can check the availability of your preferable wireless device
driver in drivers/net/wireless directory.

Regards
Amit Pundir

7

Thanks for the information.

Looks like we may be getting somewhere.

So I have a Trendnet TEW-424UB USB wifi adapter that uses the RTL8187B
chipset.

When Android boots up, it shows the following:

usb 1-1.2: new high speed USB device using musb_hdrc and address 4
usb 1-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8189
usb 1-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-1.2: Product: RTL8187B_WLAN_Adapter
usb 1-1.2: Manufacturer: Manufacturer_Realtek
usb 1-1.2: SerialNumber: 0014D1328908
usb 1-1.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

But it does not get enumerated as wlan0 or any other name.

# netcfg
lo UP 127.0.0.1 255.0.0.0 0x00000049
eth0 DOWN 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0x00001002

On the build machine, in the drivers/net/wireless directory, I do see
that they have a "rtl818x" directory, and inside it includes the
following:

rtl8187_dev.c
rtl8187.h
rtl8187_rtl8225.c
rtl8187_rtl8225.h

So it looks like the appropriate drivers are there, but how do I make
it such that it's part of the kernel? Or if it already is part of the
kernel, then why does it not get enumerated was wlan0?

Thanks!

-Stan