This is my personal evaluation of the device.
This device is a USB connected wireless router, about the size of a thumbnail, including the USB connector.
Security supported is only WEP, WPA/WPA2, WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK; so I’m not even sure it will connect to my router.
Sells for about $30NZ so thought I would risk playing with it.
Tested on a dual boot laptop with windows7 and fedora core 20. The laptop has an internal wireless (as they all do) that I could use for comparason.
Windows (windows7), don’t bother
It is sold as being supported under Windows 8/7/Vista/XP.i
The driver CD supplied with it only has a windows setup. It runs OK and installs drivers and a configuration utility without errors.
However under windows the supplied configuration utility could not locate any wireless access points; even manually entering the SSID and key of my router it could not find my router.
I didn’t bother trying to muck about with the standard windows network configuration tools to see if it could be made workable; if the supplied utility doesn’t work I’m not going to waste time using it under windows.
Oh, yes wireless was available as I was running the laptop Win7 system using synergy via the laptops internal wireless card, I would have noticed if there was no wireless connection to the inbuilt wireless card from my router as I would have had to walked across to the physical laptop to do anything. It was only the USB TP-LINK adapter that could not find the wireless router almost on top of it using the supplied windows drivers.
Linux, ohh Realtec don’t like Linux
None of the default wireless drivers work with the device, that was to be expected as there are lots of complaints on forums about the chipset being changed without new drivers provided (thats not a linux specific thing, was back in 2006 I was using 3rd party rtl drivers under solaris x86; thank code for open source coders).
The Realtec download site has really old drivers available for download for Windows, MAC/OSX and yes even Linux… for Linux kernel versions that grew old and died off in the wild many years ago, looks like its been around 3yrs since they produced a Linux driver.
I wanted something that would work on the latest kernels. This is my current kernel version
[root@hawk bin]# uname -a
Linux hawk 3.12.9-301.fc20.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Jan 29 15:56:22 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
There was a post to a working driver on github on the linux Mint forums that was fairly recent.
That post was at http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1344 and I used that as a base.
I downloaded the latest driver from github they mentioned,
https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8188eu/archive/master.zip. ‘make’/’install’, no problems.
After the ‘modprobe 8188eu’ ifconfig showed I had a new wireless card.
wlp0s29u1u2: flags=4099
ether 64:66:b3:23:6a:35 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
I reconfigured wifi-radar to use only that interface for access point scanning. And it could find my router and a few others about the place… so the device works under Linux even if it does not work well under windows.
Summary, as a client wifi card
This USB WIFI device seems to work OK under Linux (with a bit of effort). It would probably take a lot more effort to get it working under Windows even though it is supposed to be for Windows machines (I assume you would have to download the latest windows drivers for it and not use the ones on the supplied CD; but the ones on the realtec download site are all old).
As purchased off the shelf (with the supplied windows drivers) it does not work under windows7 or later linux kerels. So do not purchase this one. From the dates on the download files on the vendor site this device has not been supported bt realtec for a few years now.
Ongoing
I didn’t connect it to my network, scanning access points was as far as I wanted to test for now.
I intend to use this card (or another more suitable card if this is as useless as it seems to be) as another wi-fi access point for any devices to connect to as clients rather than connect as a client to my existing router.
It doesn’t seem to support all the features needed to become an access point, so seems to be a ‘client’ card with a limited set of wireless functions
- It can be switched to master (but not monitor)
- Keys can be switched to off (but not open)
- essid cannot be set on the device, nor nwid
- it may not be possible to set it as a broadcasting master even tho it accepts a switch to master
