While I was in the UK recently, I took advantage of an Argos store to acquire a USB Wireless dongle. I bought the TP-Link TL-WN725N because it was cheap, and very small. The plan was to use it with my Raspberry PI, and a quick Google suggested the TL-WN725N would run directly from the Raspberry Pi without needing external power, and the driver was already baked into the kernel.
Of course, nothing in life is ever simple. It turns out that TP-Link have recently changed the chip inside the adapter, and are now selling version 2.0 of the device. This would be great (newer hardware is always better, right?) apart from the fact that the kernel in the Raspian linux I use on my Rasperry Pi does not have the correct driver for this new chip.
Luckily, the new chip is manufactured by Realtek who are such a great company they release driver source code for their devices. So, on my to-do list now is to compile the new wireless driver for my Raspberry Pi kernel. I suspect compiling from source will take quite a while on the humble ARM processor in the Raspberry Pi…