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MediaTek 802.11ac USB Wi-Fi Linux Driver Installation

Technical
Author
Kuan-Yi Li
Table of Contents
If you’re using your USB device in a virtual machine, see also Pitfalls Using USB Devices in Virtual Machines.

Target Devices
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Adapters with chipset: MT7610U, MT7612U.

Driver Information
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Developed collaboratively by open community members and MediaTek. 👍

MT7610U and MT7612U drivers are in-tree since 4.19.

Distributions With Out-Of-The-Box Support
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Distribution Since Version
Kali Linux 2019.3
Parrot OS 4.7
Ubuntu LTS with HWE 18.04.3 (Bionic Beaver)
Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo)
Linux Mint 19.3 (Tricia)
Fedora 30
CentOS 8.1
Arch Linux 2018.12.01

Driver Installation
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Debian 10 (Buster)
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MT7610U and MT7612U support require the presence of both driver (kernel module) and firmware (some binary blob) to work. While the driver is included in the kernel package of Debian 10, the firmware resides in non-free archive area, which is, by Debian’s distribution policy, not included by default.

To deal with the situation, if you’re going to perform a fresh install, do it with a image from images including firmware packages.

For machines that already have Debian 10 installed and running, you might need to manually add non-free component and install package firmware-misc-nonfree from it.

Steps to Install Firmware
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Add non-free component to sources.list according to this example.

Then

sudo apt update
sudo apt install firmware-misc-nonfree

Appendices
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VID/PID
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References
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