Real Tech when Your Realtek Card Fails You

OK so far a while now when I go some places my new Asus machine with xubuntu on it either failed to connect to wifi or connected at 4 to 6 Mb/sec and then did not connect to the Internet.  This most often happened at places using what I call a concierge Internet.  Likely I call it that because I first encountered it in hotels.  When logging in one encounters a page of legalese and must accept the terms before proceeding to the Internet.

The first solution suggested by Evan Carroll of Houston Linux Users Group which will now be called here Awesome person 3 was that since I was running xubuntu 14.04 in the year of 2017 that I upgrade to the currently supported version.  That took a while and version support is a subject for another blog post.

OK so I was updated to 16.04 and many things were a bit visually different but the connection problems persisted.  It should be noted that the wifi "worked" as did the Internet access at greater than ninety percent of the places I go.  Some with the concierge, some not password protected and some password protected "worked" and connected to the Internet including my three wifi networks at home.  I am a strong believer in redundancy.

So maybe a word for wifi and/or Internet not working at all locations will be wifiN.

So, next was an upgrade to my driver by compiling it from source to the newest version at a HLUG Wednesday night meeting after downloading it from Github by Awesome person 3.  Likely I updated xubuntu again after that or maybe just because I am me I was still again in a wifiN state.

Next I moved from a well established group that promotes civic minded technology in Houston to focusing on my own startup for promoting strictly Open, Open, Open, civic technologies in the Greater Houston area.  I took a membership at Station Houston because it is an Awesome space with Awesome leadership and Awesome members.  I knew this was a wifiN location and budgeted a month to concentrated time slicing to make it a not wifiN location aka wifiNN.

So awesome person five connected me with awesome person seven who spent about an hour determining this was a known issue, updating my driver while connected via LAN and leaving a breadcrumb trail in my terminal.

Next time I updated xubuntu I was wifiN.  I love it when things do not work and give me an opportunity to learn.  There was a quick break room conversation with awesome person seven where I gleaned some keywords to search on but if I was to do that in my Awesome new space I had to log in on the dark side.  Slack post ensued and here are some excerpts:

randy777

6:48 PM

No need to spend time on it right now.  make clean and sudo make clean both tried to tell me something about target clean not being there.  I did update my Windows side Firefox so I sort of have slack.  Thanks for the help.  I will work on reading up on what make is trying to tell me and the header and kernal stuff as well as that github repo.

randy777

8:19 PM

Still no need for you to spend time on it.  I woke up to a boken water pipe at home this morning so did not get to station

8:20

I did read a bit of docs though and then did:

8:22

sudo /etc/pm/power.d/rtl8821ae_power_save_off
cd rtlwifi_new/
make
make clean

8:24

restarted my computer and maybe the power of suggestion but it feels like I did something good.

8:29

that leaves the header, kernel and repo stuff to read even if the wifi works next time I get to station.  I will let you know either way.

8:30

broken pipe that was

randy777

4:24 PM

Thank you for the help and the words.  You have helped me more than you could know.

randy777

4:31 PM

I did all that stuff above and a bit more reading as well which allowed me to send Google a set of words that returned more reading and eventually got me to https://medium.com/@elmaxx/ubuntu-16-10-rtl8821ae-drivers-part-2-electric-boogaloo-2a27261658eb which does a lot of the same commands you did so I did them at home then when I came here did not work but after disabling networking and wifi then doing the install, restarting, doing the modprobes, enabling and restarting or something like that I am up on the xubuntu side again.  Hurrah.
 In short there was that Medium blog post above that solves the main part of the problem and continues to work after the next update so for now I will say I am in a wifiNNt state.