Getting TP-Link TL-WN722N to work with Kali

Question

I am trying to get the TP-Link TL-WN722N USB WIFI adapter to work with Kali Linux in VMWare Player.

I was able to get it to work outside a VM in Elementary OS (Ubuntu based) by following the instructions here: http://aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=compat-wireless Making wlunload didn't work but it still used the adapter just fine.

In Kali in a VM though, I follow the same instructions and get to modprobe and get this:

kali@kali:~$ sudo modprobe ath9k
ERROR: could not insert 'ath9k': Exec format error

I checked the gcc version and it seems to match the one used to compile the kernel (I compared /proc/version to gcc -v)

Making wlunload still fails:

kali@kali:~/backports-3.18.1-1$ sudo make wlunload
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `wlunload'.  Stop.
make: *** [wlunload] Error 2

lsusb confirms it is there, and iwconfig shows no wireless connections.

kali@kali:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 009: ID 0cf3:9271 Atheros Communications, Inc. AR9271 802.11n
kali@kali:~$ sudo iwconfig
eth0      no wireless extensions.

lo        no wireless extensions.

Rebooting, unplugging and replugging the adapter, and recompiling don't seem to help. Any ideas?

Solution

I probably should have tried this first:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

I also followed the instructions linked above, but it may have worked without that.

At least it works now!