Are there any plans to support this ASUS USB dongle?
I can get it to work on a Linux Mint installation by installing morrownr’s driver but I am not technical enough to do the same in IPFire.
The USB dongle in question.
Hello Rudy - Welcome to the IPFire community!
Plug in the USB device. Go into the console or terminal and enter lsusb. Please post your results.
This is what I see:
[root@ipfire ~] # lsusb
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0438:7900 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Root Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0438:7900 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Root Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 04e8:4001 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd PSSD T7
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
For reference:
https://wiki.ipfire.org/hardware/networking#howto-identify-devices
Also - here is the list of supported devices:
https://wiki.ipfire.org/hardware/networking#usb-lan-dongle
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Thank you!
The device is listed in the lsusb output as:
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 008: ID 0b05:1a62 ASUSTek Computer, Inc. 802.11ax WLAN Adapter
Bus 003 Device 005: ID 0e0f:0002 VMware, Inc. Virtual USB Hub
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0e0f:0002 VMware, Inc. Virtual USB Hub
Bus 003 Device 007: ID 0846:9055 NetGear, Inc. A6150
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0e0f:0003 VMware, Inc. Virtual Mouse
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
The dongle is in bold.
From the morrownr github site it references that its driver supports RTL8832 and RTL8852 chipsets.
Looking in the IPFire code the linux kernel has anRTL8852 chipset driver available.
From looking up the details of your dongle, unfortunately it is using the RTL8832 driver and this is not available in the IPFire drivers set, which probably means that it is not provided by RTL into the Linux Kernel.
Further searching found Ubuntu saying that the AX55 is using the RTL8852BU chip driver and that their installation of that USB Dongle is based on that chipset.
If that is the case then the dongle should just work with the available driver in IPFire.
The only hiccup might be if the USB Dongle is not correctly triggering udev to load the driver into the kernel. The 8852 driver is installed but not loaded. So the USB Dongle being inserted should trigger udev to load the 8852 driver.
If that is not working properly then the only option would be to load the module manually and then try plugging in the dongle.
With the dongle inserted run the command
lsmod | grep 8852
and you should get a list of the driver modules that have been loaded.
If you just get the prompt back with no info then it means that no 8852 driver has been loaded.
The command to use to manually load the driver is
modprobe rtw89_8852ae
or
modprobe rtw89_8852ce
or you could load both if not sure which version is required.
You can test that they have been installed by running
lsmod | grep 8852
and if both have been loaded then you should see the following
rtw89_8852ce 16384 0
rtw89_8852c 548864 1 rtw89_8852ce
rtw89_8852ae 16384 0
rtw89_8852a 667648 1 rtw89_8852ae
rtw89_pci 61440 2 rtw89_8852ce,rtw89_8852ae
rtw89_core 323584 3 rtw89_pci,rtw89_8852c,rtw89_8852a
cfg80211 1134592 4 rtw89_core,mac80211,rtw89_8852c,rtw89_8852a
which is what I found on my system after running the modprobe command.
If the module(s) are then loaded and the dongle then works then you would need to run the modprobe command via rc.local so that when you boot your IPFire that module is loaded.
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Thank you for that thorough reply!
I tried doing what you have suggested but sadly I can’t see the device showing up.
With the 8852 driver loaded via modprobe, if you plug in the usb dongle and then run the following command
less /var/log/messages | grep udev
the last messages might give some indication if udev was even triggered by the dongle being plugged in or if it was triggered what response was obtained.
If the 8852 driver was successfully loaded and could be found with the lsmod command but the usb dongle does not trigger any response and does not work with it, that suggests that the dongle requires the 8832 driver which is not available in the IPFire kernel drivers.
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