[gimmejimmy]

Hello. I'm trying out the live CD. When my USB wifi adapter is plugged in the boot stalls at "Starting HAL daemon" whether doing a normal or safe boot. So I tried plugging it in after logging in. Doing that makes things like the terminal and Control Center unable to start. Even log out and shut down won't work. It's an Edimax 7318ug with an rt73 chipset.

[sarcastic_bastard]

Sorry, don't use wifi, or anything remotely sounding like your device, so am not sure what to suggest. Hopefully someone with more experience with this sort of hardware will pop along, so please just be patient, and I'm sure someone will be able to offer some insight. That aside, does it boot fine without the device inserted? How do you find it then?

[gimmejimmy]

It works fine without the device plugged in. In PCLOS2007 the only (big) problem is the wireless doesn't work, but otherwise it's fine.

[Yami_Shi]

USB wifi is very iffy. From what I have read it has very little support in GNU/Linux or Windows so if you can you should get an addon card instead.

[azziam]

USB wifi is very iffy. From what I have read it has very little support in GNU/Linux or Windows so if you can you should get an addon card instead.

"...very little support in GNU/Linux or Windows..." does not seem to be the case at all or at least not for so many of us who have easy success with it. Most of what you may find to read about any USB wifi problems will have to do with certain chipsets and most of those have been solved. I have no problem with my USB wifi, other than that it doesn't usually start on boot as it should. Also, in my laptop, my USB dongle works much better than the built-in wifi because I can use a USB extension cable and hang the dongle in a window for much better reception.

The original poster in this thread is using a chipset I am not familiar with so I can't help much except to say try a different one.

[ClareOldie]

To use a device with rt73 I have had to resort to ndiswrapper.
To do so I had to isolate all the rt modules and then use rt73 firmware from the repository.

I have only used this on the KDE PCLOS though.
Even then when the screensaver kicks in the whole lot freezes.
Mine is an older device .. a few years old, Belkin USB dongle.

I don't know how useful that will be for the Gnome release.