G3TDJ

gr-kiwisdr is working well here Christoph in Linux Mint 19.1

Built exactly to github instructions and tuned to DDK2 Weather RTTY on 4583 KHz as shown in the attached gr-kiwisdr.jpg

many thanks

Andy G3TDJ

This dongle was literally the first I tried from the spares box so is many years old. However the lsusb command says it is DWA-131 802.11n Wireless N

It's better not to get too recent with wireless devices as the Kiwi uses Debian "Jessie" which is two version behind the current Debian and the kernel used is unlikely to support recent hardware.....There is a post on another thread where somebody had updated the kernel to get a Kiwi wireless dongle working on 5 GHz. After update the dongle worked on 5 GHz but the Kiwi did not run.

Andy G3TDJ

Just to add that "wavemon" is included in my July 12th original post on this thread about getting wifi dongles with the rtl8192cu chipset working with the Kiwisdr so that details of the "wanted" wireless AP can easily be identified. Wavemon is a superb command line wireless monitoring tool.
From Github

"wavemon is a wireless device monitoring application that allows you to watch signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration and network parameters of your wireless network hardware"


It's interesting to note that Matti65's wireless dongle installation, and my Netgear rtl 8187b installation both install as wlan0, while my rtl8192cu install will not "ifup" as wlan0, but works fine with "if up wlan1". So it may be necessary to try wlan1 if wlan0 does not come up.

Just to add that "wavemon" is included in my July 12th original post on this thread about getting wifi dongles with the rtl8192cu chipset working with the Kiwisdr so that details of the "wanted" wireless AP can easily be identified. Wavemon is a superb command line wireless monitoring tool.
From Github

"wavemon is a wireless device monitoring application that allows you to watch signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration and network parameters of your wireless network hardware"


It's interesting to note that Matti65's wireless dongle installation, and my Netgear rtl 8187b installation both install as wlan0, while my rtl8192cu install will not "ifup" as wlan0, but works fine with "if up wlan1". So it may be necessary to try wlan1 if wlan0 does not come up.

The apparent anomalies with connman may be because there are conflicts between the network configuration stored in /etc/network/interfaces and the connman configuration. Connman does not use /etc/network/interfaces to store config.

Interestingly I inserted a new D-Link DWA-131 wireless dongle with a rtl8192SU chipset into my kiwisdr and this appears as wlan2 with an "ifconfig -a" command. (This chipset works well with the firmware-realtek driver)

I chased this down to a udev rule that seemingly creates a new wlan interface number each time a new mac address is encountered.

In /etc/udev/rules.d I can see three udev rules, one for each of the three wireless dongles which have successfully worked in the kiwisdr

I've compiled a new kernel module for a rtl 8192EU chipset, so using the "theory" above this might just appear as wlan3 when the new dongle is inserted - that's if the new 8192eu.ko module is accepted !

Unfortunately I could not compile the rtl8192eu kernel module with the "stock" kernel because there are no linux headers for that kernel version on the kiwi and I have not been able to find any on the 'net.

So this needs a kernel upgrade plus a download of the linux headers. There are many kernels available as shown with an apt-cache search linux-image....then for linux-headers.

I tried to get a measure of consistency with HB9TMC who has noted in another thread how various kernels perform with the kiwi. Using the kernel he has adopted allowed a successful compile of the rtl8192eu kernel module, although there was minor patching of the source to achieve this. But, there was an error when the new module was deployed with modprobe.

Hence I have gone back to the kernel version nearest to the stock 4.4.9, which is 4.4.30-ti-r64 and the linux-headers-4.4.30-ti-r64 are available.

Using the 4.4.30 kernel and headers the 8192eu kernel module compiles successfully with no need to patch the source ! The new kernel module is accepted by the system and modinfo and dmesg indicate things are OK. I am in the process of tinkering with the kernel module configuration to include the rtl8192eu as an new alias so the module gets "attached" to the wireless interface. If I get the D-Link operational I will write the process up.

The source I use is https://github.com/Mange/rtl8192eu-linux-driver/tree/master, but I did not follow the included dkms procedure as I guess we won't be changing the kernel very often. I installed build-essential and bc, left the driver source as is and added ARCH=arm, the kernel version and path to the kernel source on the "make" line - compilation takes about 40 minutes.

The apparent anomalies with connman may be because there are conflicts between the network configuration stored in /etc/network/interfaces and the connman configuration. Connman does not use /etc/network/interfaces to store config.

Interestingly I inserted a new D-Link DWA-131 wireless dongle with a rtl8192SU chipset into my kiwisdr and this appears as wlan2 with an "ifconfig -a" command. (This chipset works well with the firmware-realtek driver)

I chased this down to a udev rule that seemingly creates a new wlan interface number each time a new mac address is encountered.

In /etc/udev/rules.d I can see three udev rules, one for each of the three wireless dongles which have successfully worked in the kiwisdr

I've compiled a new kernel module for a rtl 8192EU chipset, so using the "theory" above this might just appear as wlan3 when the new dongle is inserted - that's if the new 8192eu.ko module is accepted !