please can somebody advise a usb wifi adapter that will work on Haiku? thank you
None will work. Wifi support in Haiku is very incomplete, and you’d be lucky to get it to support your PCI wifi adapter.
In regards to wifi on Haiku.
Quoted text below was taken from here:
http://www.haikuware.com/blog/wlan-stack-sum-up-on-going-and-future-work-html
There is one restriction all drivers have in common: They only support PCI based devices, though no PCMCIA, CardBus, ExpressCard, USB or ISA based ones.
Only PCI, miniPCI, PCI-Express, miniPci-Express and PCI-X are supposed to work.
USB wifi will not happen for long time. Try to get some form of PCI or PCI-X for your desktop or laptop by looking at supported wifi hardware on list provided from above link.
Then why are there two USB drivers in the network folder then?
Don’t the wireless adapters look like Ethernet ports to the OS?
Note: while the wireless works on my netbook, if I could find a working USB adapter it would be possible mount the stick on an extendion cable for best reception while still letting me move my computer around.
That link I gave was to Colin’s blog about progress on wireless porting. Colin is the guy porting over the wireless drivers to Haiku. With that, I can pretty much say that Colin knows what he is talking about when it comes to wireless cards. 
Until Colin says otherwise, I will trust what he stated to be correct.
If you believe a wireless usb network driver exists then get the wireless card/chipset to match the driver and see if it works. ie: test it out and find out for yourself and then let us know
[quote=Earl Colby Pottinger]
Don’t the wireless adapters look like Ethernet ports to the OS?[/quote]
No. Very early ones sort-of did (none of those were USB of course) but a modern 802.11 device is basically a radio transceiver, and most of the higher level protocol is implemented in software in the OS kernel, the “wireless stack”.
Some of the 802.11bg adaptors could cram much of the functionality into firmware on the device, at a cost in capability and performance. You can see something like this approach in the first wireless drivers Intel developed for Linux, which may have been ported to BeOS. But USB devices tend to concentrate on cost-saving and simplification, which means that’s unlikely to be an option.
Haiku of course does not have the resources to implement its own wireless stack, so it has imported a FreeBSD stack.
“If you believe a wireless usb network driver exists then get the wireless card/chipset to match the driver and see if it works. ie: test it out and find out for yourself and then let us know”
I would love to. But I have two major problems.
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Chipsets. While I can look at the USB drivers to see what chipsets are supported, none of the @#$%^& USB wireless dongles out there list their chipsets! It’s not in the manuals, it’s not on the resellers websites, and it’s is not on the manufacturer’s websites. Why this is held as a deep dark secret is beyond me.
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Restocking fees. Most stores will not open the shrink-wrapped packages without you buying it first, then they charge a restocking fee if it does not work and you want to return it. If not for that I would spend an week going from store to store trying out as many USB adapters that I can.
So like the OP, I hope someone out there know which USB adapters may work.
Since the stack is imported from FreeBSD the best place to look for supported cards would be in FreeBSD documentation:
http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/ral/list.html
That list shows supported Ralink based adapters. The USB collumn shows a few to try.
There is no USB wifi stick with a driver for Haiku, I’m aware of. The only alternative that crosses my mind would be a wifi ethernet bridge. But I don’t know whether the size of these devices is comparable to a usb stick.
“That list shows supported Ralink based adapters. The USB collumn shows a few to try.”
Thank you for the URL, if I can find any that do work I will post about it here. However, the last few post suggest I am wrong and will not find any. But I can afford the money to test 4-6 models at-least so I will start looking.
None of this usb sticks will work in Haiku. When I was saying I’m not aware of any working usb stick, I really was implying, that I’m not aware of any “Non-FreeBSD-based” driver for usb wifi sticks. Though I know that none of the listed sticks will work, because the list is based on a FreeBSD-USB driver and there is just no such driver for Haiku.
Earl, you need to listen to and trust what ColinG is saying. ColinG is the developer who brought wifi to Haiku and should know best. If ColinG says no usb wifi then it does not exist (yet) for Haiku. usb wifi will come only when someone does the coding work.
I also searched in network/wlan folder and there is nothing listed for usb. Meaning there is zero chance anything would even work.
Where you maybe confused is that there are two (or three?) wired usb network drivers. You can get hardware for wired internet with usb device but not for wifi. Anyone with older laptop with pcmcia could get usb wired ethernet (with correct chipset) and use Haiku with internet.
In Haiku’s repo, network folder is for wired ethernet, network/wlan is for wifi adapters.
I also wish hardware makers listed their chipsets for their devices because it would make choosing compatible hardware easier but they expect most users to use Windows or Linux OSes which supports all hardware.
Yes, I am aware of ConlinG’s work, he is the reason why I have a working WiFi on my Toshiba NB205 for the last month.
By the way, Thanks a million for your work Conlin.
Ok, now I am really confused.
In /boot/system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev/net the drivers i saw were usb_asix and usb_ecm.
And the Pegasus driver have references to an usb.device in it.
Are you saying these driver are only for support of wired Ethernet adapters?
Yes, those drivers are for wired ethernet adapters.
You can also see this in the source. Everything under wlan folder is for wireless adapters. Everything in network folder is for wired (except for wlan folder). wlan folder used to separate wireless from wired adapters.
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/src/add-ons/kernel/drivers/network
You can always check the revision log (or scan code) for device info. Example for usb_asix:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/changeset/28746/haiku/trunk/src/add-ons/kernel/drivers/network/usb_asix/Jamfile
If you search for that hardware, ie: AX88172
You find the manufacturer page for the chipset:
http://www.asix.com.tw/products.php?op=pItemdetail&PItemID=85;71;101
And can confirm it is USB2->Wired Ethernet:
AX88172 – USB2.0 to 10/100M Fast Ethernet Controller with MII Interface
EDIT: Pretty sure I am right but you should look into the code & revision logs for each of those drivers to be sure because I have not examined them further - except for looking at ASIX in the past.