After moving here to the Boise area, it turns out the best place for a wifi router in our home is right near the kitchen. This is where the (only working) phone jack is (we're using CenturyLink DSL), and it's also right in the middle of the house. Unfortunately, this is far from my desktop and server, neither of which had wireless cards when we moved.
I had a few options for dealing with this:
- I could use one of the routers I have as a "client bridge", which would talk to the main router, and plug the desktop and server into the hard wire ports on the router. The downside to this approach is that the two routers I have are both wireless G, which I've decided is just too slow for modern use.
- I recently picked up a refurbished Netgear WNDR4500 wireless N router from Newegg for the awesome price of $35. I have already flashed it to DD-WRT, and I could use it as the client bridge, but that seems like an awful waste of this beast of a piece of hardware. Instead, later on this will be our main wifi router, and the current modem/router combo will be relegated to modem-only status.
- Note that I will still be using one of the wireless G routers for printer duty, at least until we replace our 7 year old printer with a wireless version.
- I could run a long ethernet cable over to the office to plug directly into a router. I don't like this idea, though, mainly for aesthetic reasons.
- Install wireless cards into the desktop and server.
The adapter works easily on the Windows desktop. However, this post is about the steps I needed to take to get it working on Ubuntu Mate.
Included instructions
First I attempted to just follow the instructions that came with adapter (found here). I downloaded the driver from the Edimax website. However, the process failed when I got the the part where I was to "make" the driver. (This is not like how turtles make, but rather means to compile the source code into binaries that the system can use.) I got a bunch of errors and the process wasn't successful.Turning to the web, I found this and this, both of which directed me to use a driver off of github instead. Below are the instructions that I followed:
- Download the zip file file from https://github.com/abperiasamy/rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux. I put this in my Downloads folder.
- Open a terminal (I am using Ctrl+Alt+t for this these days). Type the following commands:
cd ~/Downloads
unzip rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux-master.zip
cd rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux-master
make
sudo make install - Then I just plugged in the adapter, and now wifi is working!
After upgrading the kernel, I will need to run the following from the same driver folder:
make cleanNote: This post is part of a loose series. Go here for a full list of all posts in the series.
make
sudo make install
5 comments:
Thank you so much for this post. I get in installed now but I don't know how to make it show up in Network Setting yet. Appreciate your post a lot though!
I actually just had to reinstall this yesterday. But instead of following my instructions here, I just downloaded the updated driver direct from Edimax and ran the install.sh script ("sudo bash install.sh"). This worked fine, and is a mite easier than what I've posted here.
Driver is at http://www.edimax.com/edimax/download/download/data/edimax/global/download/for_home/wireless_adapters/wireless_adapters_ac1200_dual-band/ew-7822uac
Thank you for your post. After struggling with all the other forums I came across yours and it solved it quick. Strange thing, after having to update it blew the drivers so I tried it like in your comment with the drivers from Edimax and an error was generated when the "sudo bash install.sh" ran.
Thankfully I always keep a copy of the instructions I find useful downloaded with the drivers I successfully install. It's a PAIN sometimes to have a smoothly running machine in Linux but without people like you I'd have given up long ago. Many thanks!
Edimax now has a tutorial for compiling the driver on higher kernel versions, and works with Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS. It is here:https://edimax.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/14000041287-how-to-install-ew-78xx-11ac-adapter-in-linux-with-kernel-higher-than-v4-1
Thank you! I've gone through this before, but had forgotten about it. Downloaded the Edimax driver and it wouldn't "make". You'd think they would have updated it to work with the newer kernel versions by now. Your method worked great.
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