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How can I get a driver to support my USB wifi dongle - Printable Version

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+--- Thread: How can I get a driver to support my USB wifi dongle (/showthread.php?tid=5983)



How can I get a driver to support my USB wifi dongle - Rocklobster - 04-17-2018

Just loaded my Rock 64 4G with Ayufan's Xenial desktop image and everything is working fine. I currently have it operating on a wired Ethernet connection. I plugged in my wifi dongle, an Edimax EW7318Ug but the Rock64 Xenial distribution does not appear to have a driver that supports it. On my PC version of Xenial I have in the past just added Linux Firmware Non Free to resolve this problem. This appears to be not possible in Xenial now.

I issued the lsusb command and this is the following output.

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501/RT2573 Wireless Adapter

The good news is the Rock64 recognises the dongle but I was wondering how I could go about adding a driver to support. I'd appreciate any help pointing me in the right direction here.

*I accidentally posted the original query in the Pine64 section but couldn't move it*


RE: How can I get a driver to support my USB wifi dongle - Luke - 04-17-2018

(04-17-2018, 04:56 AM)Rocklobster Wrote: Just loaded my Rock 64 4G with Ayufan's Xenial desktop image and everything is working fine. I currently have it operating on a wired Ethernet connection. I plugged in my wifi dongle, an Edimax EW7318Ug but the Rock64 Xenial distribution does not appear to have a driver that supports it. On my PC version of Xenial I have in the past just added Linux Firmware Non Free to resolve this problem. This appears to be not possible in Xenial now.

I issued the lsusb command and this is the following output.

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 148f:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501/RT2573 Wireless Adapter

The good news is the Rock64 recognises the dongle but I was wondering how I could go about adding a driver to support. I'd appreciate any help pointing me in the right direction here.

*I accidentally posted the original query in the Pine64 section but couldn't move it*

Hey, have you tried this?


RE: How can I get a driver to support my USB wifi dongle - Rocklobster - 04-18-2018

I've seen that but a lot has changed on how drivers are loaded since 12.04. That's Kernel 3x and we are on Kernel 4x now. Linux Firmware Non Free was introduced to deal with the lack of proprietary wireless drivers in Ubuntu. That's seems to have changed too in 16.04. 

Ayufans image doesn't appear to have support for older USB wifi devices but I may be wrong here. I don't want to start manually installing the wrong drivers and break the installation without being pointed in the right direction though thanks for the heads up.


RE: How can I get a driver to support my USB wifi dongle - Rocklobster - 04-18-2018

Found this link but it looks heavy duty http://xman3141.blogspot.ie/2011/01/how-to-compile-rt73-driver-for-arm.html

I'm wondering is this the route to go now.


RE: How can I get a driver to support my USB wifi dongle - Rocklobster - 04-19-2018

I decided to go a different route and downloaded the Armbian image (test image for the Rock64) from armbian.com which supported Ralink "out of the box". I was also able to use armbian-config to configure the Rock64 (equivalent to raspi-config on the Raspberry Pi). 

Everything is working fine now and I've got my home automation system up and running that was running on the Raspberry Pi. Very noticeable performance increase on the Rock64.