Raspbian & Realtek 8192eu Wifi - Revisited

STOP READING NOW IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE DISAPPOINTMENT.

It’s been a while since I originally wrote about the Raspbian & Realtek 8192eu WiFi USB Wifi adapter and just recently I wanted to build something from some old Pi’s I had knocking around. I needed Wifi so went to install the adapter I have using my notes. They no longer apply. Seems the creator of the previous builds has retired them and a new method is needed.

This lead me here: https://github.com/Mange/rtl8192eu-linux-driver

Only trouble is with my kernel 4.19 it wasn’t able to get the headers necessary to build it.

Let’s really upgrade things. It’s an old Pi B+ I’m using, no wifi - hence the need for a USB dongle. Let’s use rpi-update:

sudo rpi-update

This took it from:

Linux raspberrypi 4.19.118+ #1311 Mon Apr 27 14:16:15 BST 2020 armv6l

to:

$ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 5.4.51+ #1332 Tue Aug 4 18:28:38 BST 2020 armv6l GNU/Linux

Now when I follow the setup from github, it starts making:

$ sudo dkms install rtl8192eu/1.0

Kernel preparation unnecessary for this kernel. Skipping…

Building module:
cleaning build area…
'make' all KVER=5.4.51+………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

… Some considerable time later.

cleaning build area…
DKMS: build completed.
8192eu.ko:
Running module version sanity check.
Original module
No original module exists within this kernel
Installation
Installing to /lib/modules/5.4.51+/kernel/drivers/net/wireless//
depmod…..
Warning: Unable to find an initial ram disk that I know how to handle.
Will not try to make an initrd.
DKMS: install completed.

This is where it all came to a crashing end for me.

modprobe: ERROR: could not insert '8192eu': Exec format error

The module still fails to load and there are complaints in dmesg etc. looking like:

8192eu: disagrees about version of symbol module_layout

could not insert module 8192eu.mod: Invalid module format

So I’ve given up for now. I’ve seen others spend hours messing with kernel version mismatches and may need to get my head around that some more, but for now I just plugged in another working USB Wifi adapter.