Fenvi AC 1300 Wi-fi adapter 5 Ghz not working [Solution]

Hi there!

Just went through a simple issue on my pc after buying a 5 Ghz USB Wi-fi adapter not working, found a solution and wanted to share the solution with the community in case someone ever comes to face something alike.

[CONTEXT]
I have both a laptop and a desktop computer. The laptop is a simple model which doesn’t come with in-built 5 Ghz adapter (2.4 Ghz only), and the desktop computer doesn’t have a network card at all (I was using a 2.4 Ghz TP link wifi adapter, but got tired and wanted to get rid of it).

I decided to buy a 5.0 Ghz wi-fi adapter from Aliexpress, and according to the post it would work out of the box with all operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux as well). As you can imagine, that’s not entirely true and it was not recognized by both my machines (laptop: Linux Mint; desktop: Manjaro).
The device “Fenvi AC 1300M” is widely known and very often sold all over the world, so as I know many Linux users can also buy it, face the issue and get stressed… this is the reason of the post.

[INVESTIGATION]
After some research I’ve found that others have also complained on the same issue. It is not detected by system when you plug it in (no 5.0 Ghz wifi networks), however the computer does recognize it.

run “lsusb” on terminal. This particular device should show as: “Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL88x2bu [AC1200 Techkey]” (ac1200 is actually a different model of this same brand… but anyway, that’s how it shows).

People originally posted the issue and solution on this thread on AskUbuntu, but the solution did solve the issue on my end using both Mint (ubuntu based) and Manjaro as well.

[SOLUTION - Installing the driver]
Just make sure your system is up to date. On Manjaro we can use: pacman -Syu
Then we can install the drivers from Github running the below input:

sudo git clone "https://github.com/RinCat/RTL88x2BU-Linux-Driver.git" /usr/src/rtl88x2bu-git
sudo sed -i 's/PACKAGE_VERSION="@PKGVER@"/PACKAGE_VERSION="git"/g' /usr/src/rtl88x2bu-git/dkms.conf
sudo dkms add -m rtl88x2bu -v git
sudo dkms autoinstall

After this, just make sure to reboot the machine and it should be working as expected.

It worked for me both on Manjaro and Mint as well.
I believe another Manjaro user had the same issue and posted it on this forum (link here not entirely sure as he seems to be describing another brand - TP Link), but the solution has never been posted, so I decided to make this post. Hope it can be of help of anyone else in the future.

this is also an attempt to return just a fraction of all the help I get on this forum with the community

Cheers!

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The RTL88x2BU-dkms driver is in the AUR so no git clone needed.

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Oh, I actually didn’t know that. Just checked AUR and it’s indeed there, so let’s use that solution then. Thanks for the contribution, Robin!