ok, I promised I would follow up on this one: got this on http://amazon.com - $11: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005CLMJLU/
Plugged it (not even on the BBB’s USB port, but on a standard non-powered cheapo USB hub) . Works. End of story. Get a normal 1ms time on ping, no lost packets, as it should be. Does not matter whether ethernet is plugged in or not - why should it - but of course the whole point is to disconnect ethernet!
I won’t get philosophical here, but hey, ‘generic’ dongles are all good and nice but it’s a lottery. I’m a bit disappointed at @Adafruit_Industries for selling that sort of cheap junk - I would expect them to select their products based on quality, not margin… Or maybe I just got a bad one. and you did too. And others too in the thread… It you read this at Adafruit, take it as positive criticism, guys, and get back to showing us you’re the best 
@Edouard_Lafargue Thanks, I’m going to give one of those a try myself.
FWIW, the ones that Adafruit sells seem to work just fine on the Raspberry Pi, which is why I’ve been wondering if the USB port on the Bone is underpowered.
@Noah_Friedman well at the end of the day, you can only expect so much of those micro dongles whose antennas are tiny, and all the electronics encased in the USB plug… I don’t even think they are actually USB certified, are they? I could not find a USB logo on the box anyway.
After a few more hours of using the Edimax dongle, I noticed that using a USB extension does improve reception marginally. I also do get occasional ICMP drops if I ping it constantly, but it is actually very usable with a RTT of 1 to 10ms, which was not the case with the previous dongle. YMMV.
Mine shows up in the system and can definitely be detected by the various methods… But I guess I’m not configuring it right, as whatever I try doesn’t seem to get it connected to my network.
I’m doing all this from the command line though, so maybe there is something much easier if I went into the GUI… (I don’t currently have the right cable.)
@Jason_Stewart1 , it doesn’t get much easier than using the CLI: edit /etc/network/interfaces to add your SSID and PSK passphrase, plug in your dongle. That’s it… (On Ubuntu at least. The default interfaces file even contains a commented out example to help).
Yeah… I tried that… I think because angstrom uses connman it doesn’t work the same way…
First things first: get rid of connman. Just add the necessary ifup entries to your rc.local file, if Angstrom even supports that. (If not, it’s relatively simple to write a service entry for systemd that will invoke one.)
(For one thing, connman incorrectly assumes, nay, enforces, that you only want one network connection up even if multiple interfaces are available. You can’t change it to do anything else.)
BTW, I checked: those dongles use about 80mA when associated to an access point, nothing extraordinary… But they seem to be very sensitive to the supply voltage.
@Noah_Friedman Thanks… I’m going to look into it.
I’ve had a terrible time with it on last week’s Angstrom with a 2.5A DC adapter. Updated to latest rtl driver, etc. Basically, I have only managed to get it to connect one time each to the WiFi networks at home and work, and then after rebooting and trying to connect again it wouldn’t work. Seems like some of the configuration information out there is outdated, and there also seem to be frustrating interactions between wpa_supplicant and connman, for example if I put my psk in the connman config and also in wpa_supplicant.conf it is more error prone. In my case the encouraging this is that going by the logs it seems the driver is initializing and up and working, so my problem appears to be on the configuration side.
@Nicholas_Olsen same with me… the thing is up and running and system sees it fine… I just can’t get the configuration right to get it running on my network. Nothing I do seems to work.
Ok I got it up and running… sheesh… So basically (this is kind of silly) in /var/lib/connman/wifi_string_of_numbers_managed_psk there is a settings file… Apparently in it my SSID somehow got changed to a random string of numbers… Once I changed it to my actual SSID (and disconnected the ethernet) it logged right onto the network.
Weird…
… and how is it running now? Is it fully reliable, or does it come and go? In my case, the network config is fine, but the dongle just cannot keep the connection up properly - the Edimax dongle does much better, though not perfect either.
seems to be staying up… although the location I’m going to have the thing seems to be making it rather slow (In the basement)
Maybe unusably slow… I might just end up running a wire.
Some usb wifi dongles have a much larger external antenna, or at least a connector, that might improve reception. (Assuming you’ve got room for one wherever you plan to mount the board, of course.)
Yeah… I don’t know if I feel like monkeying with more… Running the wire won’t be too hard, and since it’s in the basement it doesn’t have to be that pretty… 
buggar. just purchased one of these from adafruit!
what wifi usb modules HAVE worked? keep in mind - I am in Australia, so don’t say something from Amazon
I thought I would follow up on this: I finally found out that one of the main problems was that the stock Linux kernel Realtek driver is just very bad… I came across instructions on how to compile the Realtek version at http://bonenotes.tumblr.com/ and guess what? The same crap dongle is now a decent dongle and keeps connection. I guess I owe @Adafruit_Industries an apology for saying they sold bad dongles 