My Wireless Network USB Adapter used to find the same number as my laptop's built-in network card. I have been running this Backtrack Live OS from a USB. But after my manipulation of the construct to boot this Backtrack OS from harddisk, my wireless USB adapter finds less than half the amount than before, whereas my laptop built-in wireless card still sees all of them.
Now I want that linksys usb thing to behave just as my laptop built-in wireless card!
Couple of things, n usually provides no speed or range increase over b/g, the only time it seems to be greater is when the salesmen mouths are moving, or the ad people are wriing lies...... Second, the built in wireless card uses an antenna bult into the lid of the laptop, while a usb dongle has a little teeny tiny thing inside the dongle, or even the external usb devices have multiple/mimo/diversity/antennas, which can't be changed, and are usually the cheapest things the manufacturer can get away with, as you can see, don't work very good in most instnces
Bottom line, there are **NO** n standards yet, so if you bought anything with it's snake oil charlatin claims of bigger/better/more range/faster/etc, you got robbed....
Given the lack of information regarding the model and version of the Linksys device, which version of BT you used(BT3 beta?), does it use the same driver on the hard drive as it did from the USB, whether you still get all the wireless networks if you try booting BT from the USB again , you would be better off asking on the appropriate BT forum.
Hard to say, but the driver takes the signal/noise ratio, creates a cutoff number (n), and says display it if it is higher than n, and don't display it if it is less than n... the value of n probably changed with different drivers/os's......
ever play with something like say netstumbler? It will show a lot of AP's, but many are way too weak of a signal to connect too, many of which will show in netstumbler, but not in the various wifi programs used by the os to display (since they are too weak to connect to)...... so you can see that the program determines what is displayed and what isn't... Sounds like the linux driver/program just isn't bothering to show ap's that are too weak to connect to.
If you extend that signal strength/noise argument to the antennas in the lid of a laptop/usb dongle, that too will change the signal/noise ratio...
To specifically answer your q, it is a different program/driver with linux/windows, and has different cutoff numbers (what shows/what doesn't... ie one may show -80 and the other may show -79)
Are you losing the display of ap's that you use/know have a good signal, or just marginal ones?
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