I'm still having problems with the wifi dongle. I have a RT5370 Wireless Adapter. Type the following command to get yours:
lsusb
This will list all USB devices connected. After that I did
iwconfig
This will list all the network adapters. In my case this showed up:
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"genie-net" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.422 GHz Access Point: 00:18:39:CF:07:0E Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:on Link Quality=51/70 Signal level=-59 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:29 Missed beacon:0 lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions.
I noticed the power management was on. Have I found the reason here? That remains to be seen. I ran:
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off
To turn off the power management. Now I just have to wait and see... Hopefully not to be continued.