USB-AC56 - Official Asus drivers fail compilation with error 'file_path redeclared as different kind of symbol'

Question

I have a USB-AC56 Wireless-AC1300 wireless adapter and kernel version 4.4.0-92-generic on a standard ubuntu 16.04 installation.

I downloaded version 4.3.1.4 of the driver from the official asus site. The installation process involves unpacking and compiling the driver source code using make. When I do that I get:

In file included from /home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/include/drv_types.h:95:0,
                 from /home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/core/rtw_cmd.c:22:
/home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/include/hal_com.h:412:13: error: ‘file_path’ redeclared as different kind of symbol
 extern char file_path[PATH_LENGTH_MAX];
             ^
In file included from include/linux/seq_file.h:10:0,
                 from include/linux/pinctrl/consumer.h:17,
                 from include/linux/pinctrl/devinfo.h:21,
                 from include/linux/device.h:24,
                 from include/linux/dmaengine.h:20,
                 from include/linux/netdevice.h:38,
                 from /home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/include/osdep_service_linux.h:35,
                 from /home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/include/osdep_service.h:41,
                 from /home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/include/drv_types.h:32,
                 from /home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/core/rtw_cmd.c:22:
include/linux/fs.h:2610:14: note: previous declaration of ‘file_path’ was here
 extern char *file_path(struct file *, char *, int);
              ^
scripts/Makefile.build:258: recipe for target '/home/han/downloads/RTL8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/driver/rtl8812AU_linux_v4.3.13_14061.20150505/core/rtw_cmd.o' failed

I have also tried using chili555's answer which uses open source drivers but they don't seem to work for the newer kernel versions giving an error like:

Module 8812au not found in directory /lib/modules/4.10.0-28-generic

I found people hit similar compilation problems here with a TP-link wifi adapter and they suggest that the driver is not supported for newer kernels and use some rtl8192cu-fixes. On their github page they say:

As a rule of thumb, this driver generally works with devices that use the RTL8192CU chipset, and some devices that use the RTL8188CUS, RTL8188CE-VAU and RTL8188RU chipsets too, though it's more hit and miss.

My device is an RTL8812au chipset though.

Any help much appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

Thanks to chili555 for the comment - using the https://github.com/jeremyb31/rtl8812AU.git repo seems to have worked.

Instead of pulling the repo with git I just downloaded a zip from master at 1965843f9096ccb7f16ed065f6d9cc3885cc31c1, unpacked it then did:

sudo apt-get install dkms
sudo dkms add ./rtl8812AU
sudo dkms install rtl8812AU/5

and restarted and the device appeared in the list of connection options.