usb wifi adapter not recognised by ubuntu 22.04

Question

i have a small usb wifi adapter that came with my computer but it is not being recognised whatsoever by ubuntu, even with commands like lshw -C network and lsusb i can’t see it. there are no available drivers that i can find for the device. if it is helpful i believe it is the addon tech AWU650

Answer 1

USB wifi adapters that require an adapter are second class.

Get a USB wifi adapter with built-in Linux kernel support! That means, when you plug it in, it just works. Here is a list of such devices.

Many USB wifi adapters simply do not support Linux and will not work with Linux. Many will work as long as you can find a valid driver and are able to successfully install the driver. However, if you upgrade your Linux kernel, there is no guarantee that the driver will continue to work and there is no guarantee that an updated driver will ever become available. You can read more about the drama here: https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi

I recently went through the process of getting a USB wifi adapter up and running. See: How can I know if a wifi adpater will work with Ubuntu?

Answer 2

The manufacturer/vendor actually provides drivers for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Downloading the ZIP file with everything we can conclude the chipset for which the driver is provided is Realtek RTL8821AU and yes, it must be listed with lsusb, you probably didn't see it or didn't recognized it.

Anyway...

You may try the manufacturer provide driver with its specific instructions. In a nutshell cd into the extracted folder and runinstall.sh. OR, probably better, follow the instructions here for installing an more up-to-date version of the driver: https://askubuntu.com/a/991650/1210606