NetGear N150 wireless usb stick not working with Raspbian Wheezy on my PI

Question

I am running a RaspberryPi with raspbian-wheezy:

uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 3.18.5+ #744 PREEMPT Fri Jan 30 18:19:07 GMT 2015 armv6l GNU/Linux

How i want to use a NetGear N150 Wireless USB stick as a wlan interface:

dmesg
[    3.401856] usb 1-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 4 using  dwc_otg
[    3.523552] usb 1-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0846, idProduct=9043
[    3.532493] usb 1-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[    3.541771] usb 1-1.2: Product: WNA1000Mv2
[    3.547744] usb 1-1.2: Manufacturer: Realtek
[    3.553858] usb 1-1.2: SerialNumber: 00e04c000001

The device is not automatically detected. After plugging in the stick into a windows machine, it seems as the stick uses a Realtek rtl8192cu chip. Loading the 8192cu kernel module does not seem to work, there is still no wlan0 device.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Never mind, I found a solution:

The usb id is not detected by the 8192cu kernel module as a supported device. After tweaking a bit and adding the following code to the rc.local file, everything works as expected:

modprobe 8192cu
echo "0846 9043" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/rtl8192cu/new_id
ifdown wlan0
ifup wlan0

To have this handled automatically on module insertion, put the following line in /etc/modprobe.d/netgear_n150.conf:

install 8192cu /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install 8192cu; echo "0846 9043" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/rtl8192cu/new_id

Going the extra mile: having it load automatically is more system specific, but on Arch Linux, adding a file in /etc/modules.load.d containing the module name is sufficient.