Arch Linux

Pacopag

Member

Registered: 2011-05-29

Posts: 287

DLink A1200 Wireless USB Adapter

Hi.  I've been at this two days now, and I'm almost ready to go out and buy 50 feet of network cable and start drilling holes in my walls.

I've got a DLink A1200 wireless USB adapter.
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According to this thread https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=182467 the drivers are not in the kernel by default.  So I installed rtl8812au-dkms from the AUR.  Then I was able to see the interface

$ iwconfig
wlp5s0u2  unassociated  Nickname:"<WIFI@REALTEK>"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.412 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated   
          Sensitivity:0/0  
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

lo        no wireless extensions.

enp6s0    no wireless extensions.

I'm trying to use wicd, as it's always served me well in the past.  Wicd detects my wireless network fine, except that it shows the signal strength to be -1%.  When I try to connect, it hangs on "Validating authentication...", then fails after a while.  Out put in console says

ERROR:dbus.connection:Exception in handler for D-Bus signal:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dbus/connection.py", line 230, in maybe_handle_message
    self._handler(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/share/wicd/gtk/gui.py", line 253, in handle_connection_results
    error(self.window, language[results], block=False)
KeyError: dbus.String(u'bad_pass')

I also tried disabling wifi security altogether in my router settings.  In this case, wicd looks like it connects quickly, then goes to "Not connected".
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To make sure the problem is not with wicd, I went through the manual steps

$ systemctl stop wicd
$ ip link set wlp5s0u2 up
$ ip link show wlp5s0u2
3: wlp5s0u2: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether b0:c5:54:ff:f9:95 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
$ wpa_supplicant -i interface -c <(wpa_passphrase your_SSID your_key)
Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant
Could not read interface interface flags: No such device
nl80211: Driver does not support authentication/association or connect commands
Could not read interface interface flags: No such device
Could not read interface interface flags: No such device
interface: Failed to initialize driver interface

#Or if I run the last command with sudo
Successfully initialized wpa_supplicant
Failed to open config file '/dev/fd/63', error: No such file or directory
Failed to read or parse configuration '/dev/fd/63'.

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I also have the cd that came with the dongle, and located the .inf file.  I tried to use ndiswrapper.

$ ndiswrapper -i netrtwlanu.inf
installing netrtwlanu ...
$ ndiswrapper -l
netrtwlanu : driver installed
  device (2001:3315) present
$ ndiswrapper -m
adding "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" to /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper.conf ...
$ depmod -a
$ modprobe ndiswrapper

All these steps seem to return successfully, but I can't see the interface.  I tried loading the module at boot,
/etc/modules-load.d/ndiswrapper.conf

ndiswrapper

Then, during startup (after a reboot) it barfs a bunch of lines with "unknown symbol" something or other, and "couldn't load driver", or "couldn't prepare driver". Not sure because the output during boot is too fast.

I'd love to get this working.  Thanks for any help.