We recently bought this Ultra mini usb wifi adapter for our laptop that had it’s internal wifi card fried. Since this laptop was acting really bad with Windows XP, we installed Ubuntu on it.

At first Ubuntu couldn’t recognize the adapter. Then I wanted to try ndiswrapper. All I had to do was to install ndisgtk (sudo apt-get install ndisgtk). It installs ndiswrapper-utils package as a dependency. Then point the ndisgtk to the .inf file of the driver.  (net8192cu.inf)

Here is a more detailed write-up for generic ndiswrapper configuration from ubuntu.

The ID for this adapter is: 0bda:8176
When you run lsusb it shows as: Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
The manufacturer id is: AWLL5088