How can I manually set a usb device to be a wireless adapter?

Question

I just changed the wireless adapter I was using because my old one was crapping out. However, now my network manager doesn't register the device as a wireless adapter, even though I can see it when I lsusb.

Although they're different devices, I believe the driver should be the same as the old one. My current device is an Ourlink AC600 usb wireless adapter, which I believe the rtl8812 driver should work for. I've reinstalled the driver multiple times from source, restarting my computer as well, but that doesn't seem to help the issue. I'm running debian 10 for the record

To be clear, I currently can't see any wireless networks in my network manager, and in fact there's no option for wifi at all.

Since I can see the device is still registered by my system, is there any way that I can manually tell my system to treat it as a wifi adapter?

Answer 1

You cannot "set" some particular device "to be used as something".

The kernel drivers specify which devices they can work with. You can see that in the kernel source, and if the drivers are compiled as modules, also with modinfo (in the alias lines).

You can use lsmod to see if the driver module actually gets loaded, and also inspect dmesg to see what happens when it gets loaded.

If the rtl8812 driver doesn't pick up your new device, that means its alias lines don't cover your device, or it runs into an error when trying to use it.

You can update the driver (e.g. by switching to the latest kernel, if the newest source alone doesn't help) and hope that now it will pick up your hardware. You could also change the source code to include the ids of your new device, but very likely this will only lead to a kernel crash if the driver actually doesn't support it, or in the worst case it might even damage the hardware.