Saturday, December 26, 2015

It Worked For Me (Sort Of) - Raspberry PI and D-Link DWA-171A1

I recently purchased a D-Link DWA-171A1 Wireless AC Dual Band USB Adapter to use with a Raspberry PI 2 B after seeing a posting that stated that it worked out of the box.  Well…

It didn’t work out of the box but I was able to get it to work by compiling the driver.  I used this code from GitHub on the Raspbian Jessie image dated 11/21/2015

  1. Loaded the Raspbian Jessie image from here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ Linux raspberrypi (4.1.13-v7+)  to my SD Card.
  2. Added the following packages using apt-get: apt-get install dkms build-essential bc
  3. Downloaded and unzip the driver from abperiasamy/rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux GitHub repository:  https://github.com/abperiasamy/rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux/archive/master.zip
  4. Download the appropriate kernel headers for your version of Raspbian.  I found the ones I needed here: https://www.niksula.hut.fi/~mhiienka/Rpi/linux-headers-rpi/.
  5. Install the headers using sudo dpkg –i <package name>.deb.
  6. cd to the directory you unziped the driver into.
  7. Using nano or some other editor update the Makefile:
  8. CONFIG_PLATFORM_I386_PC = n
    CONFIG_PLATFORM_ARM_RPI = y
  9. The using the following commands build and install the driver.
  10. # sudo make clean
    # sudo make
    # sudo make install
    # sudo modprobe -a 8812au
You should now see the DWA-171 as a wireless interface and should be able to configure it.
I tried the same procedure using a Raspberry Pi B running Arch Linux with a 3.12.26-1-ARCH kernel and wasn’t able to get the driver to compile.
Thanks to all those who made resources available to help me along this journey.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Wow. This actually worked for me on my Pi Model B+ with the same adapter.
The only difference was:
sudo modprobe -a rtl8812au.
Thank you very much!