rasberry pi: 2 different wifi adapters not working

Please pardon the n00b questions…

So I installed Volumio on my pi just a couple days ago (to use with the hifiberry). I am able to understand and get the hifiberry enabled, but have been through two wifi dongles with no luck whatsoever. What concerns me is the first one I tried works fine with an old raspbmc build with no user intervention. One is a Tenda dongle from Microcenter and the other is a Cisco-branded N-based dongle.

Am I missing something obvious? I’m a linux novice at best.

Thanks for any help!!!

Anyone?

Ok, let’s try to know if they are recognized, via ssh do

lsusb

And paste here the output.

So we can install the missing firmware…