Netgear MA111 USB wireless adpater woes with MEPIS Live

Trying to install on a wireless, Netgear MA111 (USB) adapater on MEPIS Live linux is a royal pain. After trying in vain to get it to work and reading a billion newsgroup postings, I came to realize that soemthing was just wrong with MEPIS.

If you go to OS Center->Network interfaces you can enter information for WiFi, DNS, eth0, waln0, etc, etc.

You can turn start and stop the interfaces. So if your wireless isn't working, the first step is to stop the wlan0 interface . Then you need to enter the proper information for WiFI (the [E]SSID for your wireless access point, etc).

Then you you need to re-start the wlan0 interface. However, MEPIS wouldn't let me restart it (the stop/start button just froze). I tried a ton of tweaks to get this to work, but to no avail.

The only way I could get it to work was to make sure that when MEPIS started it could connect by default to my wireless router - which means I had to broadcast my ESSID and turn off WEP (ie, my wireless router had to be open - I think that MEPIS by default at boot up connects to the strongest access point it can find. If you, like me, have lots of neighbors AND you don't broadcast your ESSID, you're screwed.

So once I broadcasted my ESSID and turned off WEP, MEPIS would auto-connect and it worked fine.

FYI - using the same MEPIS Live CD (3.4.1) on a my laptop with a different wireless card (Linksys PCMCIA), I could easily stop/start the wlan0 interface. So, I believe the problems lie with MEPIS and my Netgear MA111 USB adapter.

NOTE - if you install MEPIS, I think these problems go away because you can save the profiles/settings for what the wireless adapter should connect to. But if you are using MEPIS Live, have a Netgear MA111, you may be screwed like me.

BTW - using iwconfig/ifup/ifdown didn't help either. Had the same issues.