I just got my USB wifi adapter and new mouse today, and of course my first thing was to set up network sharing. It went in a flash on Windows. I installed the wifi adapter’s drivers, and it sorted out the rest. Internet sharing was pretty much automatic.

Getting stuff to work on Ubuntu isn’t near as simple. But hell, i need a cli program to set up even my wired connection (PPoEconf), so i guess i shouldn’t be surprised that things didn’t work out so easily. Google said i should try ndiswrapping the Windows driver, but while it installed, it wouldn’t work.

The adapter is a Ralink RT3070 chipset by the way, which is (i think) supported by the rt2800usb module. Indeed, modprobeing that module did enable the network, but while the laptop could see the network the desktop created and vice versa, my phone could see neither, nor would any of my devices connect. I figured the reason is that there is no wired connection handled by the Ubuntu network manager (the internet connection is setup by pppoeconf), so it couldn’t bind the network addresses together or something.

I’ll try playing around with it more later – this time shutting irc down beforehand, as Pidgin kept disconnecting for some reason getting me banned from a few channels for too many join/parts. Until then, i guess i can just keep stealing that unsecure wifi that i’ve been using with my phone for months now.