I needed another WiFi adapter for a computer at work. I had several old USB WiFi adapters laying around, and I thought I should try to make use of them, rather than buying something else. This lead me to try out an “AboCom Systems Inc [WN2001 Prolink Wireless-N Nano Adapter]” that I had on my desk.
When I plugged it in, the Ubuntu 18.04 computer recognized what it was and tried to load it, but gave some nasty dmesg errors in the process. It also couldn’t see any networks in the office. Here’s the output of lsusb:
alaskalinuxuser@alaskalinuxuser-OptiPlex-7010:~$ lsusb
------------------
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 07b8:8188 AboCom Systems Inc AboCom Systems Inc [WN2001 Prolink Wireless-N Nano Adapter]
..................And here are the dmesg errors:
[1730947.161636] rtl8192cu: Failed to polling REG_APS_FSMCO[APFM_ONMAC] done!
[1730947.161640] rtl8192cu: Failed to init power on! [1730947.161642] rtl8192cu: init mac failed!After digging around for a while, someone suggested this online:
alaskalinuxuser@alaskalinuxuser-OptiPlex-7010:~$ echo options rtl8xxxu ht40_2g=1 dma_aggregation=1 | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8xxxu.confHowever, that didn’t help either. Finally, after searching around, I ended up finding that they got this information at pvaret’s Github, which also said to do this:
Make sure to blacklist the older rtl8192cu driver, which some distros seem to load by default otherwise.So, I edited /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf with nano and added these lines:
# Bad wifi driver
blacklist rtl8192cuAll that remained was to run:
root@alaskalinuxuser-OptiPlex-7010:/home/alaskalinuxuser# update-initramfs -uAnd a quick reboot gave me a working USB WiFi! It was great of folks like pvaret to share their knowledge online so I could get this thing working!
Linux – keep it simple.