Getting Beaglebone black and green to work with Edimax, Keebox and D-Link wifi adapters

Wifi adapters: No luck out of the box with an Edimax EW-7811UN, Keebox W150NUIEEE, or dlink DWA-121.  The latter two were recognized by my Beaglebone Green, but wouldn't associate with my access point.  The Edimax showed up on my Beaglebone Black after an apt-get dist-upgrade, and associated once, but had tons of packet loss and never associated again.

Error message from the Keebox and D-Link usb wifi adapters:

# iwconfig wlan0 essid MyWifiName

Error for wireless request "Set ESSID" (8B1A) :

    SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not permitted.

Fix: 

# ifconfig wlan0 up

Then "iwconfig wlan0 essid MyWifiName" works.

I tried this after connecting via ethernet and running apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade, so I'm not sure if it'd work out of the box.