Installing the UGREEN BE6500 WiFi 7 USB Dongle on Arch Linux

đź”— | by Chris McLeod

I had a problem where the integrated WiFi 7 adapter on my MSI motherboard would randomly just… disappear… from the system. As in, completely drop off the PCI bus and not show up again until I’d completed a couple of rounds of clearing the CMOS, and even then, it was a bit temperamental as to how many times I’d need to go through the dance. Annoyingly there was no rhyme or reason as to when this would happen. Could be 6 days between episodes, could be 6 weeks or more. Thankfully there was a dedicated button on the back of the motherboard and I didn’t have to open up the case and mess with jumpers every time, but it was still a faff.

After losing a couple of hours to the latest failure, I broke and bought a USB WiFi dongle, specifically, this UGREEN dongle (affiliate link). Now, I admit, I didn’t do as much research as I might normally do if I was less annoyed, but I trusted in the modern state of Linux distros and WiFi drivers. It couldn’t be as bad as the days of ndis_wrapper and loading Intel’s Windows drivers on Gentoo, as I remember doing in the early 2000’s, could it?

No. It was nowhere near as bad as that! While I did have to compile a couple of modules, and run a few commands, it was pretty uneventful.

Note: the following is what I did to get this working on my PC. Your mileage may vary.

Install pre-requisites: 

uname -r # get your current kernel
yay linux-headers # pick the version matching your kernel
yay dkms
yay usb_modeswitch # stops the dongle showing up in "CDROM mode"

You can use pacman if you prefer, but I used yay.

Clone the driver/firmware repo 

git clone https://github.com/morrownr/rtw89
cd rtw89
sudo make cleanup_target_system

Build and install using dkms 

sudo dkms install $PWD
sudo make install_fw

Copy the module configuration 

sudo cp -v rtw89.conf /etc/modprobe.d/

Load the drivers 

sudo modprobe rtw89_core_git
sudo modprobe rtw89_8922au_git

Check the adaptor is showing 

lsusb
  ...
  Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0bda:8912 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 802.11be WLAN Adapter
  ...
  
ip link show
  ...
  wlan1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000 link/ether...
  ...

You’ll notice there the adaptor is showing up, but not connected. That’s fine. In my case the integrated adaptor was still running as wlan0, was connected, and I hadn’t configured a connection for wlan1.

Next steps

From here, I went through the following steps:

  1. Reboot
  2. Checked the adaptor was still showing up as expected after the reboot
  3. Reboot into the BIOS/EFI Firmware
  4. Disable the WiFi functionality of the integrated card (I kept Bluetooth switched on)
  5. Saved and rebooted

Logging back into Plasma, WiFi connected as usual. Checking ip link show listed only wlan0, but that’s because the USB adaptor was now the only one on the PC. Checking on my router, just to be sure, showed the connected device manufacturer as UGREEN instead of MSI - success!

Final note: This might not be needed in the future

Going by this Issue on a repo related to the driver I used, the rtl8922au drivers will be integrated into the Linux kernel itself, starting with Linux 7.2. That should make many adaptors based on the Realtek 8912/8922 chips “plug and play” for the most part. I imagine it will probably need a few months and patches to truly settle down, but it’s a great step forward.