Ubuntu – Getting a driver for a NETGEAR A6201 WiFi USB Adapter

driversusbwireless

I just set up my computer with one hard drive dedicated to Ubuntu and another dedicated to Windows. I did this so that I can learn Ubuntu and decide if I want to stick with it. I have a NETGEAR A6201 WiFi USB Adapter that is my only source for accessing the Internet. It is not natively supported by Ubuntu but I found the driver on GitHub. I want to know if it is possible to download the driver from GitHub onto a USB flash drive and then use this drive to install the driver on Ubuntu.

Best Answer

I have been looking for a proven reliable way to use USB drive as an apt repository and simply apt-get install the driver. I have, so far, been unsuccessful. I propose another method that will get the prerequisite build-essential installed.

This method, although it is tedious, will work. The list of deb files you need is this (with the exception of bcmwl-kernel-source): https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/GbZ689gYXw/

Create a folder on your desktop to hold the files. I suggest:

mkdir ~/Desktop/debs

Browse the USB drive and look in pool/main/b for build-essential; in pool/main/d for dkms and dpkg-dev; in pool/main/f for fakeroot and so on. Continue until every package on the list I provided is dragged into the debs folder.

Now, back to the terminal:

cd ~/Desktop/debs
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

EDIT: Now let’s install the driver. Please download this file and transfer it to the desktop of the Ubuntu machine: https://github.com/kaduke/Netgear-A6210/archive/port-to-4.15.zip

Right-click it and select ‘Extract here.’ Now back to the terminal:

cd ~/Desktop/Netgear-A6210-port-to-4.15
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe mt7662u_sta

Your wireless should now be working.

Please tell me how it proceeds; I will probably have one final step.