Recently upgraded to Xanmod kernel 5.15 stable and noticed that the drivers for a lot of Realtek WiFi chipsets have been mainlined.
My desktop doesn’t have WiFi and the few times I need to tether, this has usually proved to be an exercise in frustration. I went through a lot of dongles on amazon India but never did find anything cheap that would 'just work'. A few are marked as 'Linux compatible' or 'Raspberry PI' compatible but that just seems to be a way to jack up the price.
Eventually, I settled on a Realtek dongle I had lying around the house that had an esoteric 8188fu chipset. These dongles are cheap and work well enough in a pinch - if you could get them to work. Thankfully, I found this repository. After adding the PPA, the dongle did work albeit a few nitpicks - it used to run hot, spam kernel message log and in general manage 20 - 30 Mbps at most and so on. Anyway, sufficient for me to tether once or twice a month when my ISP conked out.
Back to topic - noticed the mainlining of Realtek drivers and decided to get a 2T2R dongle… Amazon India had Tenda U3 Mini Wireless N Adapter (Black) and one of the reviews mentioned that it was working on Kali linux - ok… promising and not too pricey - so got it.
It came yesterday and I stuck it in and guess what - no dice… connection spotty and even when it showed as connected, it seemed flaky and pages wouldn’t load or get stuck… speed test reported something in between single digit mbps and would drop to kbps or worse… :sigh:
Anyway - given that the previous driver from kelebek333 had been my mainstay for so many years, decided to give it a shot -
# I already had the ppa added
sudo apt install r8192-dkms
# blacklist the in kernel rtl8xxxu driver
echo "blacklist rtl8xxxu" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.confa quick reboot and now WiFi shows a 70Mbps connection
A related 'I wish' - in case anyone knows their way around NetworkManager:
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Set wireless tether as highest priority network - if that’s connected - all traffic should go through it
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Set wired as next highest
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Use home wireless as least
I’ve tried playing with NetworkManager’s priority field but it doesn’t do what I want. For now, it’s just switching the interfaces on and off when my wired network goes down.
