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USB WiFi Stick on Beagleboard xM Using wpa_supplicant

One of the most popular USB WiFi sticks in Indonesian market is TP Link which is actually a Ralink wireless adapter (looking at its vendor ID code). Attaching it using wpa_supplicant without explicit driver assignment will return the following error lines

ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Invalid argument
ioctl[SIOCSIWENCODEEXT]: Invalid argument
TL-WN321G-01.jpg

TP Link TL-WN321G USB WiFi Stick

Within minutes it will also crash the system with messages similar to:

kernel: [ 5645.279693] SysRq : HELP : loglevel(0-9) reBoot Crash terminate-all-tasks(E) memory-full-oom-kill(F) kill-all-tasks(I) thaw-filesystems(J) saK show-backtrace-all-active-cpus(L) show-memory-usage(M) nice-all-RT-tasks(N) powerOff show-registers(P) show-all-timers(Q) unRaw Sync show-task-states(T) Unmount ETM buffer dump show-blocked- tasks(W) dump-ftrace-buffer(Z)

The correct way to attach is

wpa_supplicant -B -Dnl80211 -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

The config file content is just like what the community help suggested. The stick with vendor & product ID of 148f:2573 has been part of the nl80211 development at Linux Wireless.

wpa_supplicant version is v0.7.3. Ubuntu version is 11.10 as described further in previous post.


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