TP Link AC 600 Driver for Manjaro Linux

Are you among the DIY fanatics who don’t have a 5 GHz network card in your 5+ year-old laptop? Then this post is for you. I have an HP P073TX laptop that has been my companion for around 10 years. I recently noticed that these days, WiFi comes in two channels:

a) 2.4 GHz (present in older and newer laptops)

b) 5 GHz (only in newer laptops).

My laptop only had a 2.4 GHz channel, and at times, the speed was very poor. I decided to get an upgrade, and I came across two options:

a) Upgrade the network card, or

b) Use a dual-band WiFi USB adapter.

I narrowed down option a) to a few network cards but decided to go with option b), as it was the least expensive and most convenient—all you have to do is plug the USB adapter into the USB port of the laptop.

The TP-Link AC600 is the USB adapter I used. The CD that comes with the TP-Link AC600 has installation support for macOS and Windows but not for Linux. The process I outline below will help you get the drivers for Linux, and I thought, why not document it for future reference? It can also help others who are faced with the same issue. The USB adapter is very compact, measuring only 40.5 mm in length. It also comes with a 3-year warranty. The speeds offered are up to 433 Mbps on 5 GHz (IEEE 802.11 a/n/ac) and 200 Mbps on 2.4 GHz (IEEE 802.11 b/g/n). It uses a USB 2.0 interface.

My laptop, a.k.a. Agni, is based on Manjaro, even though it came with Windows by default. Naming the laptop "Agni" (which means fire in Sanskrit) was pure coincidence. I later came to know that, according to my birth date, I am a fire element. Okay, enough with the astrology talk—let’s get back to the subject.

The first step is to update your system. You can do this by running the following command:

sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm

I really like the --noconfirm option because you don’t have to press 'Yes' every time the software prompts you to update a package.

There will be some dependencies to install the driver, so let’s install them as well.

sudo pacman -S base-devel linux-headers dkms git

The TP-Link AC600 adapter uses a Realtek chipset, so we need to install the rtl88x2bu driver. This can be obtained from GitHub. It’s better to install these in the src directory, so let’s navigate there and clone the rtl88x2bu driver from GitHub.

cd ~/src
git clone https://github.com/cilynx/rtl88x2bu.git

Next, run the deploy.sh shell script by navigating to the cloned directory.

cd rtl88x2bu
sudo ./deploy.sh 

During this process, I encountered an error message stating

Error! Your kernel headers for kernel 6.1.102-3-rt37-MANJARO cannot be found at /usr/lib/modules/6.1.102-3-rt37-MANJARO/build or /usr/lib/modules/6.1.102-3-rt37-MANJARO/source.

So, I had to install the appropriate kernel header.

sudo pacman -S linux61-rt-headers

I tried running the deploy.sh script again, but I encountered another error:

Error! DKMS tree already contains: rtl88x2bu-5.8.7.1

To resolve this, I removed the package using the following command:

  sudo dkms remove rtl88x2bu/5.8.7.1 --all

Then, I reran the deploy.sh script. Now, the installation is complete, and after rebooting your system, you should see the 5G network option under your network tabs.

Keywords : Linux, Manjaro, TP-Link, HP-P073TX, TP-Link AC600, Realtek, Network.

This is my first blog post and there are many more to come. Posts wont be limited to linux, it will encompass multiple facets of my interests.