Hi all,

I am using the TP-Link TL-WN725N USB Wi-fi dongle to connect my IOT2050 Basic to the internet. It is compatible for use with Linux (see here Product Details). I didn't see the device in my network manager (nmtui), so I upgraded my packages and installed the appropriate drivers. Particularly, I ran the command 

lsusb

to see the details of the Wifi dongle and it seems to be recognized (see attachment) as Realtek RTL8188EUS 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter. Then I ran the following command to install the drivers for Realtek devices. 

apt-get install firmware-realtek

After the installation, the USB Wifi dongle is still not detected. The drivers were installed in this directory:

/lib/firmware/

I see a folder called rtlwifi, which contains .bin files for various rtl devices including rtl8188eu.

For some reason, it doesn't show in Network manager. Please help! 

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Split from USB WIFI DONGLE.

Hi,

I am okay to ship the dongle over to you if you would like to test it out. Alternatively, I can setup a test bench in my setup and provide you access if you want to test it out remotely :)

The rtl8188eu is a so-called staging driver, i.e. code that is below the quality level of the Linux kernel, sometimes in the process of being cleaned up, sometimes still waiting for someone to pick up this task. This often happens with drivers coming from the chip vendors as separate driver packages, rather than as proper contributions to the Linux kernel.

In general, it is not recommendable to use such drivers for production purposes, they may not be mature enough yet. For that reason, we do not enable such drivers in the provided kernel. If you need it nevertheless, you will have to build a custom image with a kernel configuration that overwrites that.