I mentioned my Hewlett-Packard/Mediatek wireless Linux driver problem last week in Veritas’ Second-hand thread, and it was sad but true. I’ve been stuck using a USB cable between my mobile phone and that damned HP laptop for the last six months, and it has really been constantly annoying - having a $1,300 laptop with no wireless capability! Forsooth! And it’s all because those darstedley conjobs at Micro$haft have paid off HP and/or Mediatek to deliberately NOT supply a driver for Linux!
I bought a TP-Link USB dongal for $11 AUD last April, and got stuck here trying to compile a driver for it, which didn’t work and only gave dom0 a case of amnesia so it doesn’t remember its own name and keeps thinking it needs to update but it can’t remember what version (4.2.4) to update … so I gave up. For six months.
Then last Saturday I got lucky! Thanks Veritas for ther prompt I needed to try, try again. It turns out that the TP-Link WN725N dongal doesn’t need a driver to be compiled in the first place. It already works on Qubes OS with sys-usb and attached to sys-net. It just doesn’t know its own name is all. It thinks it’s a Realtek 802.11n NIC 00E04C0001, but that doesn’t matter because all you need to do is is attach the device that calls itself Realtek 802.11nn NIC00E04C0001 to sys-net (as well as sys-usb which was invented after I learned about Qubes OS so I don’t really understand exactly what it’s for yet), and there you have a working Wi-Fi receiver for $11 AUD and tell HP and Mediatek to go jump in the lake!