I got my Netgear wifi dongle working with my raspberry pi model A.

Here’s how I did it.

Plug in the Netgear WG111

The RPi should see it right away (verify usinglsusb ) and you’ll see something like wlan0 using ifconfig

Edit the wpa_supplicant.conf file and add the desired SSID and passphrase you want to connect to:

nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Append to this file the following array:

network={
    ssid="my_ssid"
    psk="my_passphrase"
}

Save and close the file, then bring the interface up:

sudo ifup wlan0

Verify that you’re online by pinging an online service

ping www.google.com