Beagle Bone Black Debian 12 WIFI rt8188eu

General Discussion
1

Hi,
I installed debian 12 on beaglebone black. wifi works fine with a tp-link stick (TP-Link TL-WN823N v2/v3 [Realtek RTL8192EU]).
When I try with " Edimax Technology Co., Ltd Edimax N150 Adapter" rt8188eu driver. (driver is in staging directory)
iwctl device list does not show a device
ip a shows a wlan0 device (state down, no ip)
I tested with kernel 5.10, 5.15, and 6.1 …
I also tried wpa_supplicant, but does not help.
lsmod |grep r8188
r8188eu 315392 0
libarc4 16384 2 mac80211,r8188eu

When I run debian 11.8 both wlan sticks work on all kernels (5.10, 5.15, 6.1) without any changes.
I only have configured with wpa_supplicant

lshw on debian 11.8 vs 12.5
Debian 11.8 K 6.1 → ok
lshw |grep wireless
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=r8188eu driverversion=6.1.77-bone30 ip=192.168.20.167 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn

Debian 12.5 K 6.1 → no connection
lshw |grep wireless
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=r8188eu driverversion=6.1.77-bone30 multicast=yes wireless=unassociated

seems something is missing.

Has anybody an idea howto get it working?

Thank you in advance for any tips.

Best Regards Peter

2

Very strange, same kernel/etc… So in 12.x have you disabled iwd and tried switching it back to the wpa_supplicant stack of 11.x

sudo systemctl disable iwd
sudo systemctl enable --now wpa_supplicant

Regards,
Regards,

3

Hi Robert,
thank you for your fast answer.
I tested again with disabling iwd and enabling wpa_supplicant
same result.
works with TP-Link and not with Edimax.
(by the way I use usb network rndis for windows 10)
Regards,

4

oh, missed that… so Edimax doesn’t work but TP-Link doesn’t.

Do they share the same vid/pid… (thought you had the same physical adapter on both)…

Regards,

5

I use one BBB and plug in only one stick at a time.
After replacing the stick I reboot.

6

since the two sticks have different chipsets (RTL8192 and RT8188) they should also have different vendor or at least product IDs.
you can check this with the command lsusb.

have you checked the output of dmesg directly after inserting the wifi stick that does not work (edimax)?
as far as I know, the USB VID and PID are normally used in linux to determine which module should be loaded. dmesg should tell you something about loading modules or loading firmwares if the stick is detected correctly.