Asus WL-330g and Ubuntu Linux PPC

A week ago I bought this gizmo: the Asus WL-330g Wireless Access Point and Ethernet Adapter, to use “my” iBook anywhere there's a wireless connection with the least amount of messing with configuration and drivers. The iBook is running Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and I'm happy to report that everything is working well. Since the WL-330g acts as an Ethernet adapter there's really no messing with anything at all; I just used the “Network Settings” dialog to set the iBook's network interface for DHCP.

One very strange thing happened on which I wasted nearly an entire afternoon. The device comes with a USB power adapter so that it can be used anywhere with a laptop. So far, so good. But it took me hours to figure out that I can't use just any of the iBook's two USB ports to power it. Only the 1st port seems to work. When the device is plugged in to the 2nd one, it connects and reboots 2 or 3 times before giving up entirely. Very strange!

The WL-330g comes with a Windows configuration utility which I couldn't use for obvious reasons. There is also a web configuration interface which is quite poor but usable — not the good kind of “usable” though. The documentation is virtually inexistent since it consists of screenshots of both configuration systems with little explanation about how the device really works.