last week was my graduation, and as a present from our "alma mater" (read: university of applied science hagenberg) we got an edimax ew-7317ldg - an absolute cool device. it is a wi-fi scanner and an usb-wlan adaptor for USB. the scanner works in stand-alone mode too, the wlan adaptor of course only when connected to a usb bus ;) edimax ew-7317ldg since i do not have any windows installed, and my laptop runs debian i tried to find out how to get the stick working. and here it is (ok, those that are not interested in tech-talk, skip this bLog-entry, there will be no non-tech info below this point): although there's support for zd1211 and zd1211rw in kernel 2.6.18 these versions did not work for me - there was a firmware-conflict. instead i used the debian package "zd1211-source", which installs the tarball (also available at the download-section at the zd1211 homepage) plus a few helper files that makes installation on debian easier (yeah, the "./debian/rules" stuff, for those familiar with debian). no matter in which you install the drivers, it is absolutely necessary to change a setting in the included Makefile! "ZD1211REV_B=0" has to be changed to "ZD1211REV_B=1" otherwise the driver wont work. after doing the change, run either "make && make install" or use the debian way, via "apt-get install zd1211-source; cd /usr/src/modules/zd1211; ./debian/rules binary-modules; dpkg -i ../../zd1211-module-2.bla.fasel-tralal_la; modprobe zd1211b;". after loading the module, dmesg or /var/log/message should show up this: if not, it's probably because some other zd1211-module version is loaded, like zd1211 or zd1211rw. unloading all zd1211-modules and reloading the correct module should solve it. next, a "ifconfig wlan0 up" should bring up this log-message. next, configure wlan0 as any other wlan device via iwconfig(8), like adding a specific essid via "iwconfig wlan0 essid nostromo". once done, output of "iwconfig wlan0" should look like this: voila, online! :)