More instructions on how to run/install/execute modifications for USB WiFi adapters

[rebecca-burwei]

Hello! I'm with a group of 4 friends new to networking. We're walking ourselves through this workshop. We have a rtl8192cu WiFi adapter from Adafruit. The ReadMe contains this statement: "It is possible to use other USB WiFi adapters with rt2800usb, ath9k_htc, or rtl8192cu drivers with slight modifications to the software."

Could you elaborate on this statement? I'm not sure what to do with the files at src/custom/etc/systemd/network/

Thanks!

[benhylau]

I think you'll need to change these two lines:

• 85-wlan-mesh.link Line 5
• 85-wlan-mesh.network Line 5

From:

Driver=rt2800usb

To:

Driver=rtl8192cu

These lines tell systemd "if you devices with these drivers coming up set them into mesh mode with these configurations". In your case, systemd needs to match on rtl8192cu.

Then you have to run ./build and you should find your custom configuration files in the output folder.

Also feel free to hop onto our chat, a bunch of people will be happy to help over real-time chat!

[rebecca-burwei]

Thanks @benhylau ! We were able to build with changes to the drivers. However, we did change the awk commands to sed in the build file.:

find output/custom/etc/$hostname -type f | xargs sed -i  "s/__HOSTNAME__/$hostname/g"
find output/custom/etc/$hostname -type f | xargs sed -i  "s/__HOSTNO__/$hostno/g"

We were getting errors from awk (unrecognized -i option, cannot open file). We're running OSX 10.13.6.

[benhylau]

Thanks @r-wei that looks a lot simpler. I don't remember exactly why I didn't use sed but recall that the sed on Linux and OS X behaved differently and the same command would only work on both if OS X used gsed and then I ended up using awk instead. Let's keep this issue open and I will look into replacing it in the future! Thanks for sorting this out.