PSA: Don't buy TP Link garbage NIC's.

You would think that with a picture of Tux on the box and "Linux support!" proudly written on the back that TP Link would be a descent option for a wireless NIC. You would be wrong.

Because of the the aforementioned, I bought a TP Link AC600 USB wifi adapter from Microcenter in Denver today. Got it back to the shop, unboxed, installed it. Took the "driver CD" that was included and put in the USB CD drive I use when I need an optical drive for my CNC. No actual Linux drivers on that CD, just a note that I should check the website for the latest build. Annoying, but whatever. Get on the TP Link website, download latest driver set. Won't compile. I get this message "error: incompatible types when assigning to type ‘int’ from type ‘kuid_t’" as part of a long list of malfunctions when trying to run sudo make.

At this point I google my errors and find others have many of the same problems, seems that since some kernel revisions have been made that their driver has been broken, but no driver update since January 2015. And other results turned up from google suggesting that their drivers were broken back when they were new and they just never updated them. To say nothing of just how stupid it is that the adapter that you're using to try and get connected to the internet requires a second machine just to download the drivers, when they already include a CD full of drivers for Windows & MacOS operating systems.

Tomorrow I'll be returning the TP Link and spending more $$$ on an Asus unit, which is what my dumb ass should have done in the first place.

For anyone else running across this thread, before you spend the $$$ you can build your drivers without having the physical hardware installed (or even purchased) if you want to run a pre-trial before spending your hard earned dollars. After several hours of my life wasted that I will never get back, I downloaded drivers for an Asus AC56 USB from the Asus website and they built successfully. So that's what I think I'll be exchanging the TP link unit for tomorrow.

Its not just their wifi that sucks. I purchased a cheap $20 TPlink router to wire in the garage for my LinuxCNC wifi connection. It sucked and was forever dropping out. Then I saw a fairly cheap $35 netgear wireless access point. I plugged it in and my LinuxCNC machine has never missed a wifi beat since!

andypugh wrote:

Did you try the device without drivers? There is a pretty good chance that the drivers distributed with Linux would just work.
I have never had to install dedicated drivers for any USB Wifi Dongle.

When LinuxCNC was on an Ubuntu distro I had no problem plug-and-playing with an older Netgear USB wifi dongle, but that USB dongle didn't work anymore when my HDD crashed and I updated to a newer version of LinuxCNC on a Debian distro. That NIC got broken and I bought this TP link unit which was not recognized in Debian (and on that note, I'm disappointed by the lack of USB tools on the Debian distro). It seems that the onboard ethernet on my Atom mobo is supported by the Debian package drivers but I don't want to have an ethernet cable and tripping hazard running thru the shop and into the office as its 100+ feet from where my mill sits to where the router is.