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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

I have a Raspberry Pi attached to my home network with one of these tiny WiFi adapters (http://www.expansys.com/edimax-wi-fi-150mbps-mini-usb-202741...). It's in a small white box (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-case-professional-injec...) and attached to the wall. It's completely unobtrusive, looks like it might be something to do with the phones.

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Same here - just a little more geeky, with a transparent box. ;-)

For me it's running a couple small utilities and a tincd based network, connecting various machines of my brother and me. Mostly - it's a small always-on playground machine.

The USB/Wifi dongle is interesting. I don't know much about this flavor of adapter, were the drivers already in the kernel? Any problems getting it running?

Yes, I had no problem configuring it at all. It just came up and a quick change to the config for my network and key and it was done.

The latest Raspbian seems to support it out of the box. It was pretty painless for me.

From memory these sticks are either a Ralink or Realtek chipset and are supported by all recent kernels.

How do you find the network performance with that wireless adapter? I've been tempted to buy something similar to use with my own.

My Pi is pretty close to my wifi router and I have the same stick - 4-5mb/s depending on what I'm doing with the data. You may need to turn power management off for the device.

What do you use it for?

It's running OpenVPN so I get VPN access to my home.

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