The journey to ultimate fridge magnet (part 2)

Sometimes when things aren’t going well it’s time to start again and see what you can do better.  So today I cracked. I reinstalled my old Linx 1010 and vowed to redo what I did and hopefully fix what I got wrong last time.

Return of the woes

Debian 12, loaded back on I immediately returned to my original Wi-Fi issues. One radio (the in-built SDIO) randomly not working and the TP-Link TP-725N which worked consistently, consistently slow. I returned to Google and this time I stumbled across a method for Aircrack-ng for the Realtek rtl8188eus, the card this TP-Link dongle is based on.

The steps…

Git clone https://github.com/aircrack-ng/rtl8188eus.git

Make

I received an error at this point, “Skipping BTF generation due to unavailability of vmlinux”. I extracted vmlinux from vmlinuz and placed it where’d I’d expect it to be and received the same error at this point. At this point I threw caution to the wind and ran

Make Install

Nothing bad happened but nothing good either, so far, so good? I continued with the guide

echo ‘blacklist r8188eu’ | sudo tee -a ‘/etc/modprobe.d/realtek.conf’

echo ‘blacklist rtl8xxxu’ | sudo tee -a ‘/etc/modprobe.d/realtek.conf’

rmmod r8188eu rtl8xxxu 8188eu

modprobe 8188eu

My Wi-Fi suddenly dropped. Gulping and anticipating another Debian re-installation I opened up the settings to see both Wi-Fi adapters available. I reconnected using the TP-Link and it worked. A speed test later to confirm and I confirmed that it really worked and this time at a speed not reminiscent of the 1990’s.