RTL8821CU WLAN Driver

This is a fork of the RTL8821CU driver tweaked to compile on 3.16 branch of the Linux kernel. Its intention is to be used with Openpeak OpenFrame devices, but no significant changes have been made to the driver.

The RTL8821CU IC provides both 2.5 / 5 GHz WLAN and Bluetooth 4.2 in a single package. This driver is WLAN only and doesn't provide BT compatibility.

However, the code in my rtl8821cu_bt repo should get Bluetooth up and running with 3.16 kernels as well.

Instructions below apply to OpenFrame Ubuntu Images but should be generic enough to apply to other flavours.

Hardware

This has been tested against the following adapters:

• EZCast EZC-5200BS (ID 0bda:c820 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.) - Amazon UK

Yes, that's a shill link to Amazon if you'd like to buy one.

Build

Environment

Ensure you have kernel headers and build-essential installed. These can be added to the OpenFrame automatically with:

of-install-build

Or generically:

sudo apt install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential git

Fetch, Compile, Install

git clone https://github.com/andydvsn/rtl8821cu_wlan.git
cd rtl8821cu_wlan
make -j`nproc`
sudo make install

Run

Fire up the module with:

modprobe rtl8821cu

Check its presence with:

ip a

Configure

On the OpenFrame images, edit /boot/network.yaml to your heart's content and then:

of-netplan

To apply.