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Realtek 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: RTL8811AU, RTL8812AU, RTL8814AU.

Note: Kali currently uses a separate driver for RTL8814AU.

Driver Information
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Developed internally by Realtek, and then patched by open community members.

This drivers is not mainlined (might never will be, from the look of it), so you’ll be loading a self-compiled out-of-tree kernel module. If you are running on a system using UEFI Secure Boot, you may need to either disable Secure Boot or sign the kernel module before you can load it. (We won’t cover that here.)

To check the status of Secure Boot, run

mokutil --sb-state

Output will be one of the following:

  • SecureBoot enabled: using UEFI, Secure Boot enabled
  • SecureBoot disabled: using UEFI, Secure Boot disabled
  • EFI variables are not supported on this system: not using UEFI, Secure Boot disabled

Driver Installation
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Kali Linux
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For those who are running Kali Linux ARM Image on Raspberry Pi, the driver should be installed already.

For x86 users, install package realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms

Parrot OS
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Security edition has package realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms installed by default. If this is not the case, follow the same instructions above for Kali Linux.

Debian and Its Derivatives (on x86, x86_64 Platforms)
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Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, elementary OS, etc.

APT is able to install local deb file since version 1.1—we can use that to install realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms from Kali.

Find the latest deb packages from Kali’s repository. realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms depends on realtek-rtl8814au-dkms since 25th of May 2021, so we’ll get deb files of these two.

At the time of writing/updating, the latest ones are:

wget https://http.kali.org/kali/pool/contrib/r/realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms/realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms_5.6.4.2~git20240726.63cf0b4-0kali1_all.deb https://http.kali.org/kali/pool/contrib/r/realtek-rtl8814au-dkms/realtek-rtl8814au-dkms_5.8.5.1~git20240527.d8208c8-0kali1_all.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ./realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms_5.6.4.2~git20240726.63cf0b4-0kali1_all.deb ./realtek-rtl8814au-dkms_5.8.5.1~git20240527.d8208c8-0kali1_all.deb

Although not tested, some distros should be able to perform the whole process in GUI—download deb files through browser and double-click to install. (Install realtek-rtl8814au-dkms first, then realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms.)

Fedora
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sudo dnf install dkms kernel-devel make

Note that because the kernel module is built with DKMS you should ensure you have installed and rebooted to latest kernel update before installing.

git clone -b v5.6.4.2 https://github.com/aircrack-ng/rtl8812au.git
cd rtl8812au
sudo make dkms_install

RHEL and Its Derivatives (on x86, x86_64 Platforms)
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RHEL, CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install git dkms kernel-devel make

Note that because the kernel module is built with DKMS you should ensure you have installed and rebooted to latest kernel update before installing.

git clone -b v5.6.4.2 https://github.com/aircrack-ng/rtl8812au.git
cd rtl8812au
sudo make dkms_install

Arch Linux
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These instructions are expansions of

sudo pacman -Syu --needed base-devel git dkms linux-headers

If you’re not using the default kernel, package linux-headers should be changed respectively. Say you’re using LTS kernel, the command would then be

sudo pacman -Syu --needed base-devel git dkms linux-lts-headers

Note that because the kernel module is built with DKMS you should ensure you have installed and rebooted to latest kernel update before installing.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/rtl88xxau-aircrack-dkms-git.git
cd rtl88xxau-aircrack-dkms-git
makepkg -si

Appendices
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Getting package URI
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In case that repository URL changes in the future, spin up a Kali VM or even a Docker container, and run

sudo apt update
apt download --print-uris realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms realtek-rtl8814au-dkms

Monitor, Injection Support
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Your miles may vary on distros other than Kali, which is specifically tweaked for pentesting.

VID/PID
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References
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