Mini-Howto: ROCK64 USB 3.0 WIFI Adapter (Rabbit-ear) on Manjaro

[Dendrocalamus64]

The one with the dual antennas from the Pine store.
ROCK64 USB 3.0 Dual Band 1200Mbps WIFI 802.11A/B/G/N/AC (RTL8812AU) Adapter

I had one lying around, and I thought since it was sold by Pine it would be plug & play. In retrospect, there are too many OS options for that to be guaranteed. But it does work, you just need to install the driver.

After noodling around a bit, I ended up using this tutorial for installing from the AUR:
Manjaro Linux Forum - Install rtl8812au-dkms-git driver

Basically it boils down to:
$ sudo pacman -S linux-pinebookpro-headers
$ sudo pacman -S bc dkms git base-devel pamac-cli --needed
$ pamac build rtl8812au-dkms-git

(You need the exact header package for your kernel; linux-headers wasn't the right one.)

Choose to (e)dit the build files and change the arch in the PKGBUILD to aarch64. Installing the DKMS module takes a while because it's actually compiling it at that point.

Then plug in the adapter and the module loads. No reboot needed. No need to disable the built-in WiFi, Network Manager correctly manages both.

There, now next time someone's searching the forum for RTL8812AU it will have an up-to-date hit.

The adapter comes with no instructions. You're a linux nerd, you know what to do. dmesg --follow, lsusb, and start googling.

[Dendrocalamus64]

Update: The driver the above uses stopped building as of kernel 5.15 because ipx was removed. The kernel devs gave 3 years for refactoring code; predictably no one heard of it or fixed code until it was actually removed.

The issue was reported upstream on Nov 04 and hasn't been addressed yet; it's been fixed in two other rtl8812au drivers. The maintainer said on Sep 04 "We are just about at the point where I am considering dropping support for this driver, due to USB issues with kernel 5.13."

I've switched to,
https://github.com/morrownr/8812au-20210629

Installation was mostly as per the instructions on that page. Before running 'sudo ./install_driver.sh' I edit the Makefile to hardcode ARCH to arm64,

Code:

SUBARCH := $(shell uname -m | sed -e s/i.86/i386/)
# ARCH ?= $(SUBARCH)
ARCH := 'arm64'

Otherwise it detects the architecture as aarch64 and doesn't know how to build for it.

Note the maintainer's comments:

Question: Why do you recommend Mediatek based adapters when you maintain this repo for a Realtek driver?

Answer: Many new Linux users already have adapters based on Realtek chipsets. This repo is for Linux users to support their existing adapters but my STRONG recommendation is for Linux users to seek out WiFi solutions based on Mediatek, Intel or Atheros chipsets and drivers. If users are looking at a USB solution, Mediatek and Atheros based adapters are the best solution. Realtek based USB adapters are not a good solution because Realtek does not follow Linux Wireless standards (mac80211) for USB WiFi adapters and the drivers are not maintained in the Linux kernel. These issues make Realtek drivers problematic in many ways. You have been WARNED. For more information about USB WiFi adapters:

https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi