802.11ac Realtek RTL8811 & RTL8812 woes

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I have 802.11ac 1x1 RTL8811 & 2x2 RTL8812 USB dongles, trying to make either of them work with my RPi Zero running DietPi - without any success. I use powered USB hub and beefy PSU so power is definitely not a problem. Dongles work fine under Windows and connect to my 5GHz SSID.

With RPi, RTL8811 fails to connect to SSID (reports not receiving DHCP answer or something like that), while RTL8812 seems to be connected but does not transfer anything. I use install-wifi script to get drivers. Updating RPi firmware to latest did not help; neither did messing around with interfaces & wpa-supplicant.conf.

Please advise how to resolve this issue!

2

First thing:

  • As already mentioned in the post: Do NOT use rpi-update. This is never required, the APT kernel packages on RPi are nowadays updated very regularly so the kernel is way more up-to-date then what rpi-update provided when the post was done.
  • I see the script expects/installs rpi-update automatically, although optionally based on command arguments/options. This is not a very recommended thing. However nice is that they provide lots of WiFi drivers on the download server: http://downloads.fars-robotics.net/
  • Since they provide drivers for various kernel versions, you will always find one that matches your current kernel.
  • If indeed before using the script WiFi did not work and the reason indeed was a missing driver, I would either download the required driver manually from their download server or find Linux install/build instructions from the manufacturer.
3

MichaIng I tried installing the driver without running rpi-update before updating the kernel, the result was the same. I was suggested to try different driver, will comment once I’m done.