[Solution] Xbian 1.0 Alpha 4 and Edimax EW-7811Un

[Baxtin]

Like many people having issues getting this known dongle to work I tried all of the existing solutions out there and stumbled across the solution (for me) on accident.

I had my Edimax dongle connected and I ruled out power issues since I was using a 5v 850ma hard wired Blackberry power adapter.

I used the putty/ssh method to configure my wifi and got the usual text most people see, operation not permitted the power message etc.

When I went to the Xbian XMBC side the Network Manager would not show any networks around me (despite knowing some existed). I gave up on Xbian for a bit and installed the Wheezy distro hoping the Linux GUI would get me further in troubleshooting. Inside Wheezy I was able to now see the SSIDs of other networks around me. I was still however unable to connect to mine until I started broadcasting my SSID, then it was able to connect.

At this point I loaded Xbian back on the system and configured using the SSH with my SSID being broadcast, low and behold it didn't work again. The reason being is my SSID password has the $ character in it which Xbian will not interpret to the /etc/network/interfaces folder correctly. I made the change manually and restarted the system and it connected.

I also saw one problem with DHCP where it did not populate my Default Gateway, thus saying I had no internet. I switched to static in the ssh gui and set it and rebooted which corrected this as well.

I hope I didn't recreate the above information which existed elsewhere, but I spent three days off/on getting this figured out. I hope it saves someone else some time.