Realtek Wifi RTL8192 drivers on Silverblue

Hi, I currently own a D-Link DWA-131 Wireless USB Wifi Dongle which I wish to use on my pc.

The driver isn’t in the kernel, so it is not detected by my install. By the nature of Fedora Silvervblue, installing DKMS Modules or compiling the driver by source are impractical options, as rpm-ostree doesn’t support such operations right now apparently.

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 2001:3319 D-Link Corp. DWA-131 Wireless N Nano Adapter (Rev. E1) [Realtek RTL8192EU]

I have raised a similar issue on the silverblue issue tracker on GH, but i want to explore other options for the time being

The Issue in Question

A similar issue was rectified by adding the driver directly into the kernel.

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You’ll likely have the best luck compiling your own kernel with the driver and layering it in for now (rpm-ostree install), keeping in mind the additional signing steps needed if you have secureboot enabled.

The driver landing in the upstream kernel is definitely the best way to fully fix this and it sounds like it might be a work in progress. Realtek wifi drivers have been a real pain in recent years (for windows, too). I’ve ended up replacing mine with Intel wifi cards, for what it’s worth.

huh, never thought i would be installing gentoo all over again

i will look into that option, for the time being i am betting on RPMFusion maybe releasing this as an akmod, as i have already requested. they generally don’t have an ETA on stuff like this

kernel stuff is smth i want to keep last resort, as this would mean i am barring myself from any sort of support from fedora team.

thank you for ur response!

I completely understand. I was rolling custom kernels for a while because of Realtek wifi drivers, myself. My solution was to replace them with Intel wifi cards and I did not regret that decision.

For what it’s worth, the drivers themselves aren’t the best quality and are prone to dropping connections because of the way Bluetooth and wifi are routed on the same chip. Many of the driver updates I saw were to attempt to suppress all the kernel error messages that were constantly spamming journald rather than actually fixing the problems.

I mostly need wifi for port forwarding purposes, my current set up is using my phone as a USB tether to provide internet to my pc, which basically makes my pc undetectable to my router.

Tried remedying this by rooting my phone for enabling internal port forwarding, now here I am using my left over hardware to figure things out, buying new hardware isnt a choice atm

lol