Getting Edimax EW-7811UN (or rtl8192cufw devices) to work with Chromium OS

Surprisingly easy as it happens!

Firstly boot your device and get to su command line  ([ Ctrl ] [ Alt ] [ F2 ]), log in as chronos and then

sudo su

Then pop in the wireless dongle and review the contents of dmesg.

You should see something along the lines of the following:

rtl8192cu: Loading firmware rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin
rtlwifi: Firmware rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin not available

In order to remedy this, firstly mount the OS read/write:

mount -o remount, rw /

Then create the directory structure and cd into it, and download the bin file

mkdir /lib/firmware/rtlwifi
cd /lib/firmware/rtlwifi/
wget http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/files/fw/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin

Remove the dongle and reinsert. Lights on the dongle will now illuminate and you ‘should’ be able to connect to a wireless network! The version I tested against would not scan the network so I needed to add the wireless network manually. Reboot will remember the change so all should be good from that point on.

Any dev server updates will more than likely undo any of the above so please bear that in mind.

Usual caveats around none of this ever working etc.

12 thoughts on “Getting Edimax EW-7811UN (or rtl8192cufw devices) to work with Chromium OS”

  1. I did as you say, and I get no errors in dmesg. Mine also is able to scan and does find my wife network, but it won’t connect. Fails every time. Seems like it might be a dns thing, but really not sure. Any ideas?

  2. Any ideas for getting wifi to work on a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge e520? I’ve tried the various methods to install the drivers, but no dice.

  3. No network, no wget… Any solutions???
    And Captain Obvious, why erased my previous question, I was just asked about internet connection ???

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