How to install RTL8188EUS driver on ubuntu 18.04

Question

I'm trying to install driver for my newly bought USB Wifi adapter. I tried installing driver provided in the CD that came with the adapter, it gave me this error

error: implicit declaration of function ‘init_timer’; did you mean ‘_init_timer’? [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
  init_timer(ptimer);
  ^~~~~~~~~~
  _init_timer

The driver name in the provided cd is

RTL8188EUS_linux_v4.1.4_6773.20130222

so I tried installing all the driver available on internet with name of rtl8188EUS or rtl8188EU but nothing worked. Either they give an error like above or they just don't work. I think it is because my kernel version is

5.0.0-25-generic

and they all work with some old kernel version. Please guide me how do get rtl8188EUS driver working on my Ubuntu 18.04.2 lts.

Solution 1

You'll find a known to be working driver on this github:
https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8188eu

First, undo what you did with provided CD
Then install the driver from github:

# Prepare
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get -y install dkms build-essential git

# Go install the driver 
mkdir ~/DriverBuild
cd ~/DriverBuild
git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8188eu.git
sudo dkms add ./rtl8188eu
sudo dkms build 8188eu/1.0
sudo dkms install 8188eu/1.0
reboot

If the network manager says: "Device is not ready"
Make sure you copied the firmware (rtl8188eufw.bin) to /lib/firmware/rtlwifi/

Solution 2

first, the answer of CMAK.FR is good!

what I explain here is more an adaptation I had to make it work on ubuntu 18.04

# Prepare
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get -y install dkms build-essential git

# Go install the driver 
mkdir ~/DriverBuild
cd ~/DriverBuild
git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8188eu.git
cd rtl8188eu
make
sudo make install

Comments

[Admin]

Find the driver's source code on GitHub and follow the build and install instructions there. Realtek is a really bad manufacturer, they don't maintain their drivers properly.

[Admin]

I had the same directory RTL8188EUS_linux_v4.1.4_6773.20130222 in the provided installation CD. The USB Wifi adapter worked without issues on Windows 10, and on inspection turned out that the device is actually "RTL8188FTV"; on further searching, the working drivers are at github.com/kelebek333/rtl8188fu, which work for me / Ubuntu 18.04 kernel version 4.17.

[Admin]

This adapter works fine out of the box. Will it work better with the driver?

[Admin]

@treyiii actually, later on, github.com/ulli-kroll/rtl8188fu worked fine for me but the actual issue was that I had to use USB 2.0 port for that adapter.

[digikar]

For me, kernel 4.17, 'make' all KVER=4.17.0-041700-generic...(bad exit status: 2) was the error. There's another repository at github.com/quickreflex/rtl8188eus that is supposed to work until kernel 5.1, that installed for me.

[Dominic Sayers]

lwfinger has now said[1] he will no longer support dkms and has removed[2] the dkms.conf from the repository. Notes: [1] github.com/lwfinger/rtl8188eu/issues/306#issuecomment-579312‌​568 [2] github.com/lwfinger/rtl8188eu/commit/…

[imstupidpleasehelp]

If anyone is having trouble with the terminal aborting automatically before its finished, the 3rd command can be replaced with sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade