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