RealTek Wireless adapter issues. (RTL8192ce and RTL8192cu)

Question

I have been having significant issues with the usability/reliability of my wireless cards. I have tried several fixes over the past few days. I am running ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I go from 1/10 of the speed i should be getting to not working at all. It does drop sometimes as well. (The above is in regards to my PCI RTL8192ce card)

I recently tried to install a usb wifi adapter (RTL8192cu) and I cannot even get that one to connect well enough to use. ( basically shows no "bars" on the wireless icon on the top right)

I have tried to install the realtek drivers from the realtek site but I had a couple errors with the install. (I have the output somewhere if it is needed.) I have tried as well to use the fix found here: https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/reserve-7 to no avail. I would appreciate your assistance in fixing this. (There may be a question already solving this but I have tried 2-4 fixes over the past 2 days and none worked)

Answer 1

It's a driver issue.

You might want to check out this thread. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2148130&page=2

https://github.com/pvaret/rtl8192cu-fixes

COPIED FROM GITHUB:

Ensure you have the necessary prerequisites installed:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic build-essential dkms git

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/pvaret/rtl8192cu-fixes.git

Set it up as a DKMS module:

sudo dkms add ./rtl8192cu-fixes

Build and install it:

sudo dkms install 8192cu/1.10

Refresh the module list:

sudo depmod -a

Ensure the native (and broken) kernel driver is blacklisted:

sudo cp ./rtl8192cu-fixes/blacklist-native-rtl8192.conf /etc/modprobe.d/

And reboot. You're done.

Answer 2

I have had the same issues, until I installed the DKMS driver via https://github.com/vincent-t/rt8192cu_dkms

My 8192cu is fast and stable since that driver was installed.

Answer 3

I also had a problem with connecting rtl8192ce (EdiMax EW-7612PIn V2) from my ubuntu 14.04. Actually the issue was only with APs not supporting N draft (so the old b/g standard). I checked three different boxes and all had the same issue. I had however no issues with the one AP that had N-draft support. The problem was that the default bitrate with old APs was always set to 1Mb/s even though the link quality was 70/70. But I was not even able to ping default gw. So the solution was to issue:

/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 rate auto

Unfortunately I do not see an option in ubuntu NetworkManager to specify bitrate (I do not use configuration from /etc/network/interfaces) so I added the iwconfig command to

/etc/init.d/wifirifi

and issued

chmod ugo+rx
update-rc.d wifirifi defaults