• Brand: Mercury
  • Model: MW150UH
  • Chipset: Realtek 8811CU

Chipset misery

The most tough part of linux driver install actually is find out the exactaly chipset it has, as even the same USB Wifi dongle brand and same model, the chipset might be different, thus although you googled out an answer, it might not work. Except for google direct answer, the best option is find out the Vendor ID and Product ID by command lsusb.

$> lsusb
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 004: ID 0bda:c811 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8812AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WLAN Adapter

In above listing, 0bda:c811 is the Vendor id and Product id, checking the flowing database to find out what each number represent.

After searching you will find out code 0bda represents Realtek while code c811 represents the real chipset model 8811CU, so the complete chipset name is Realtek 8811CU, Mercury just purchase this chipset from Realtek company.

Install the driver

Go to Github, download the ZIP file and unzip the file then add the excution permission to the install-driver.sh.

$> cd 8821cu-20210118-main
$> chmod +x install-driver.sh
$> sudo ./install-driver.sh

After successfully done above steps, your wifi module should be installed and go to open your WIFI and scan available signals.

A weird thing I encounted is it can not connect to the wifi even input the right password, later I dismissed this wifi and input the password again, finally it worked as charm.

0bda:1a2b or 0bda:c811

The more weird thing is the result of lsusb is different, it has two Product ID, the first time is 1a2b, then sometimes it shows c811, so which one is right? I don’t know, the best gamble is try both, install the driver respectively one by one and see which works.

Here are the driver for common chipsets you might need:

  1. 8188gu (Produt id = 1a2b): https://github.com/McMCCRU/rtl8188gu
  2. 8192eu (Product id = 818b): https://github.com/clnhub/rtl8192eu-linux

Configuration change

Once any changes made within /etc/modprobe.d/8821cu.conf, you should run the following command or will meet some ERROR message during system boot.

sudo update-initramfs -u