Reaktek Wifi Adapters and Drivers from Github

[Don]

This information may already exist somewhere on the forum, but I haven't located it. Sorry if this is a duplicate.
In my long and frequently unsuccessful attempts to install Realtek adapter drivers, I did discover (actually "rediscover," because I had to do it all over again today) a pretty easy way to do it from Github.

1. Note the chipset of your adapter. Mine happened to be rtl8812au. Fill in yours in the appropriate place in the next two lines.
2. In a terminal window, enter: git clone https://github.com/aircrack-ng/rtl8812au.git
3. When that operation finishes, enter: cd rtl8812au
4. Enter: make
5. Enter: sudo make install

It's much easier than I made it look earlier today. I hope this saves someone some time.

[GreyGeek]

That link is here.
I ended up using the driver from https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi
When ever the kernel is updated my wifi sometimes stops working because the new kernel does not have the *.ko module to drive it, so I have to do

make clean
make
sudo make install
sudo reboot

from within the directory where I installed the source. It takes only a couple minutes and the 88x2u driver gives me 867Mbits/s. Considering my fiber connection is for only 500Mbit/s the driver working well. I've gotten download speeds of 38MB/s at times downloading videos and Linux ISO's, which is about 80% of my bandwidth. A lot of sites, however, throttle the download speeds to below 10MB/s. On some kernel sites I get only 3.5MB/s.

[Don]

I was not aware that could happen with kernel updates. Thanks for the tip.

[ShadYoung]

Actually, you may want to use DKMS to install and compile the driver.

The simple way I use:

$ sudo apt install dkms
$ cd /wherever/git/put/the/source/file
$ sudo dkms install rtl8812au

DKMS will compile and install the driver and include it in its tree so that upon the next kernel update it will automatically recompile and install the module for the new kernel. I believe the driver source also includes a "deploy.sh" which should in theory run DKMS for you, though it borked for me.

[GreyGeek]

My initial install of the 88x2bu driver involved using dkms, but the method I ended up using didn't need dkms. The only thing dkms does is trigger a recompile of the kernel and dkms when the kernel is updated. The method I use doesn't use dkms. The make, make compile, make install, reboot, can be shorted by manually rmmod'ing 88x2bu and then modprob'ing it, thus not requiring a reboot.