So, I'm always having fun with running new hardware under linux. It somehow gives you a satisfactory feeling when you finally got it working. But (there is always a butt ;) ) sometimes it's just not right straight forward. The usual and most elegant way for getting a new device working is to get a recent kernel (sometimes even a git checkout from kernel.org is needed), fire up make menuconfig and select the new driver as a module or compile it in. Then you reboot with the new kernel and the device is working. Sometimes you'll need some kind of magic additional firmware which your package manager should provide. It will put a binary image into /lib/firmware which the kernel driver will load uppon activation. This not so elegant anymore but still sufficient.

The device I bought is the Zyxel NWD210N, a WiFi 802.11a/b/g/draft n USB Stick with MiMo, as far is I could see it. lsusb shows it as "Bus ... Device ...: ID 0586:3416 ZyXEL Communications Corp". In the hope that there will be native Linux drivers (as there are for some native Zyxel chips) I decided to give it a try. The butt this time is, that it does not use a Zyxel chipset, but a modified Atheros chipset (as I read somewhere, of which I can't find the URL anymore). The athXk drivers also don't work for this thingy so I had to fall back to ndiswrapper.

ndiswrapper is a kernel module that emulates a part of the Windows API for WLAN drivers and loads these Windows drivers to support a natively unsupported WLAN device under Linux. While this is a highly controversial practice it works quite well for the Zyxel NWD210N. To get ndiswrapper working under Gentoo Linux you have to:

1. USE="usb" emerge -av ndiswrapper
2. download and extract the Windows driver (according to your architecture) from zyxel.com
3. install the driver with "ndiswrapper -i Driver/WinXP32/wlanurn.inf"
4. insert the kernel module with "modprobe ndiswrapper"
5. plug in the device and use it with whatever tools you prefer (NetworkManage, wpa_supplicant)

If you want to add ndiswrapper support to your boot configuration, you can add the line "ndiswrapper" to you /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 file.

Hopefully someone from either Zyxel or Atheros someday cares about opening the specs or even supplying a native driver.