Download Alfa Wifi Driver
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And this link was provided in another post and I assumed it meant this card has something to do with a driver of the line of an MT76x driver which I thought I found and I installed it and I don't see any changes when clicking on the LUCI option Network and the Wireless option is missing.
I am working with an Espressobin box that had no wifi as delivered and getting the wifi up, getting the Wifi option under Network and figuring out the driver this device needs is not meshing in my inexperienced brain ....
Checking USB IDs is one thing, just testing a very modern (kernel 5.0 or newer) linux live system on an x86_64 system would be the easiest option - that will reveal which drivers feels responsible for it (at worst you'll have to provide the necessary firmware yourself).
The way it played out is I asked originally for which USB wifi dongle could I feel comfortable that was supported by OpenWRT. The github link was provided for me and I ordered the exact model number from the list on githum, the Alfa one.
It sadly not uncommon (at all) that vendors 'recycle' USB IDs for very different hardware, using the same model name or not. Testing and debugging this is considerably easier on a full featured desktop distro (Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, Ubuntu, ...) than an embedded distro like OpenWrt - the former provides all options at once (and all debugging facilities you might envision), for the later you need to know what you need to install - not even considering that most (driver- and kernel) development happens on x86_64, which means you're more likely to encounter arch specific issues on MIPS or ARM than on x86_64 (leave that until you know what you're dealing with).
OK, here is my situation. I am a very basic OpenWRT user and asked for suggestions for a Network File Server and it was suggested to buy this Espressobin box and this network card. I am so far over my head, I can't see the surface. The OpenWRT routers that I have set up for my family are my only Linux systems. I would not know what to do with s desktop Linux system if it was gifted to me. Sorry but most of the time I weed through this stuff - this one is a little harder.
My laptop does not have the best network card: it works only with 2.4GHz networks and it has poor signal.Therefore I decided to buy wifi dongle, and was looking for one that can work with Arch Linux.I found on the net that others got Alfa AWUS036ACH working on Arch so I went with it!Still, it took some effort to set everything up as I wanted, so I will describe the steps here.
Run ip link to see if your dongle is recognized (is there new entry when you connect it to your PC?).If not, we need to install driver. Btw, you can also check first if dongle is shown via lsusb, that should work even without driver, if not then there is some other problem also involved.
The problem is, it takes some time for drivers to catch up with new kernels, and some of them get stale, so you might need to try out a few of them in order to find one that works. While driver #3 eventually worked for me, I would certainly recommend trying the other ones also, it is very likely they might be working for you when you try this.
I liked this one the best, it is specific for 8821au and is packaged on AUR. Installation went fine, however dongle was still not showing up via ip link, I believe that is due to the kernel I was using being relatively new.
This is it! I could see new interface show up via ip link, and I could connect to a wifi network via NetworkManager (I forgot to mention before that I am using NetworkManager, but that was not really important until now).
However, I now had interesting problem: both wifi card and wifi dongle were connected to the wifi networks at the same time (I have one 2.4Ghz network and another 5Ghz network) and my system was preferring using wifi card one instead of the wifi dongle one!
The thing is, routes come and go -> if you disconnect the dongle, route will dissapear, and even if you set metric somehow, next time it appears it will have old metric. So it is important to figure out the way how to consistently make wifi dongle have lower metric than wifi card.
This is it! This set the metric to 100 and I verified that in most cases wifi dongle was preferred to wifi card. However, I also noticed that in some cases, wifi card was still preferred. I am not sure if that was some special, rare case - I should investigate more. Also, I was not completely happy with having to set this for every new connection that I define (although that happens rarely). Therefore, I decided to also try another method, which is simpler conceptually: automatically disconnect wifi card when wifi dongle is connected.
The idea is simple: when wifi dongle connects, disconnect wifi card, and when wifi dongle disconnects, reconnect wifi card.That way my system uses wifi dongle when available, and when not, uses wifi card.
Reasonable way of doing this is to write a script that toggles wifi card and then trigger that script on wifi dongle connection / disconnection events.One way to trigger the script could be via udev rules, but I learned that there is also a mechanism offered by NetworkManager (NM) so I went with that.
NOTE: I did not cover the case when dongle is already connected to the laptop on boot and additionally it manages to connect before wifi card does, but I think that should be fine anyway since it is probably prioritized then due to the lower route metric by default. I will see how it goes and add handling of this case later if needed (probably smth like: if wifi card wants to come up, but wifi dongle is already connected, disconnect wifi card).
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