I was messing with Manjaro earlier (as suggested by everyone), and I was having issues getting my wireless usb to enable. I am currently at work, but I can try to give as much detail as I can. Currently, I have to use wireless due to positioning of all the equipment in my house. I looked all over the Wiki and the forums, but could find no concrete info on the subject. I even went so far as to search the Arch forums for help, and couldn't find an answer. Basically, I have a third party driver already on a usb flash drive that I pull over in order to compile it into the kernel. When I CD over to the folder, I have no issues. When I use "make" as the walkthrough for the drivers themselves said to utilize, I get a return of "no such command". Even if I was at my computer I would have a hard time giving you a console dump do to no internet access. Does anyone have an idea as to why the make command is not working? (looking at you zoltan!)
Edit: If no one has an idea as to how to get it working, I will probably just try my luck with NDISWrapper. Never used it, but meh I am doing this to learn.
That would probably be because the certain package (base-devel, Internet tells me) that make is in is not installed. Did you download and install a minimal image? As far as I know, base-devel should be included in the full Manjaro XFCE version, but I don't know about the others.
Though, it would be good to note that make on an unconnected Manjaro probably won't work anyways, because they don't include the linux headers for the image version. I've had a wifi driver problem similar, and unlike certain distros where I could install with the driver offline, it will return an error because the headers don't exist. I had to connect and update and install the headers. I don't know if there's a way to do that offline, but if you can manage an ethernet connection, that would be the best/easiest route, probably.
Dang, I was using the openbox version, I switched over to the xfce version and did not get the same error, but in a nutshell it was telling me that the filepath for the install was inaccessible. I figure it was because I was still in the livecd version and went ahead and installed it on a seperate drive to test. I just wish it was as simple as zorin was. I literally just typed in all of my commands and it worked off the bat, just the wine and playonlinux were buggy and for some reason would not update or download plugins properly. I will be testing out the install of the drivers here in a couple of days due to being stuck at work till about 2pm tomorrow (16 hour shift). Hopefully I can gain access to network so I can run full updates of the kernel, and begin my testing.
Seems to be something with Manjaro, I got super pissed that I could not get it working at all no matter what I did. Dropped in a Mint install, and it worked after 10 seconds. Literally took 2 lines in terminal. I dont know what is with Manjaro/Arch with this usb adapter. I would like to use Manjaro, but I wont be able to till somethin is worked out.
NDISwrapper should not be necessary, because it's mainly for older very specific wireless chips, seldom USB adapters.
The problem you were having with Manjaro has nothing to do with a driver, it has to do with permissions probably. Did you check whether you were in the wifi group? Using external USB wireless adapters is seldom preconfigured for safety reasons. Had you posted your problem to the Manjaro forum, they would probably have helped you and they would be aware of the problem (the Belkin AC adapter is pretty new, they just have not preconfigured it).
Other thing is that Manjaro just pusjed out 0.8.10, they probably had more than enough to do to get that sorted, they have a murderous releases cycle (even though they're rolling release, they push out "versions" of the installer/live CD every couple of months, and those contain quite a bit of new unique features, it's a hell of a work load for such a young community, they count on user feedback to iron crinkles out, because they don't have all the hardware that needs preconfiguring etc...).
As to the make command: where did you get those drivers? On the AUR? On the repos? I wouldn't trust anything drivers (and especially not if it's to be compiled into your kernel) if it doesn't come from the official repos. Then when you get source, you have to set up a building environment first. You don't just make like in windows, because it's not safe. You have to use a fakeroot, especially if you have to package (and it's best to use a development user account just for that too). Setting up a building environment is super easy, but you have to do it once. You basically get the development packages, including gcc, and then set up a tree. It's super easy to do in seconds. But if you haven't done it on your system, compiling won't work, except through the Arch AUR package builder.
Maybe try again with the 0.8.10 live image that should be up by now.