[Closed] What do I need to browse with my Rasp Pi?

I intend to stick mine next to my mac mini, use the mac mini, and pretend that I'm using the pi when it eventually arrives. Everything I have read about them terrifies me.

In general it all comes down to which chipset your dongle is using. You need to find this out to find out what driver to load or you might be able to wrap the windows driver. Last time I tried a usb dongle on linux I used NDISwrapper to wrap the windows driver to allow it to be loaded. However being as that was about 5 years ago I expect that driver support has improved for usb dongles, however v.2.0 Rasp pi is new so I'm not sure how complete the available distributions are.

Is your netgear dongle one of these

http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#USB_WiFi_Adapters

Netgear
N150: Reported as WNA1100 device, uses the Atheros ar9271 chipset. On Debian, requires the firmware-atheros package from the squeeze-backports non-free repository (!)
N150: Some versions reported as Realtek RTL8188CUS device. Read Micronet entry above

and use RTL8188CUS script for installation. Works best plugged into powered USB hub.
WG111v1: Prism54 chipset. Needs powered hub. Follow info for Prism54 chipset on Debian wiki.
WG111v2: Realtek rtl8187 chipset (!)

Work out which chip set it is then with some google help which driver you need.

Very quickly this will be roughly what you need to do.

Try

$ lsusb

To find out the chipset but it might not work, I'm not sure.

Then see if its loaded

$ lsmod

if its not you can try to see if its installed

$modprobe -l

Then load module as root or sudo (distro depnding)

$ sudo modprobe <module name here>

Plug in dongle. Check to see if it has been seen.

$ifconfig

if you have something other than eth0 and lo it has worked. This will be your wifi dongle. E.g wlan0.

Now set up wifi. Start with an unencrypted connection.

iwconfig wlan0 essid networkname

Then work on sorting out the encryption. I just use gui for this but if you're going command line you will need some more googling as I'm not sure how to set up wap via command line other than it involves iwconfig. Gentoo have good command line tutorials

Then if that all works you will want the module to load automatically at run time to stick into a file something like

/ect/rc.d/init.d

This file may differ depending on your distribution.