I come from the Pi world, but they’re still WAY overpriced and impossible to find. I’m currently writing some software that needs to be displayed on TVs & the Pi 0 doesn’t have enough horsepower to display scrolling text without jerking horribly (which is utterly ridiculous IMO), plus getting a browser running in kiosk mode was much much much more involved than it should be… eventually just gave up.
Happened across the LibreComputer LePotato board when shopping for something else on Amazon a couple weeks ago and decided to give it a shot. Number of the board I bought is AML-S905X-CC. The one I bought came with a MT7601U USB wifi dongle, which was supposed to be plug & play.
Power adapters tried have been the CanaKit 3amp adapters I’ve used with Raspberry Pi boards, an Apple 2.4amp USB charging adapter, and a generic no-name power brick. There has been no difference between any of them.
I downloaded debian-12-base-arm64+aml-s905x-cc.img from the LibreComputer page, wrote it to a Samsung micro SD card, and watched it boot. Logged in as root, changed the password, and at this point got stuck.
There is no device node for the wifi dongle in /dev. The dmesg said that the system was renaming it from wlan0 to wlx, but there was nothing starting with wlx in /dev either. After much frustration, I noticed that I had to reset the password on every boot… little troubleshooting revealed that nothing I did was written to the card. Dug out another card - ironically this one a PNY brand - and it’s functioning how one would expect.
Unfortunately, while files written are now saved to the card, I still cannot do anything wifi-related. The information you would expect is written to the /sys/class/net/wlx files. ‘wpa_cli’ complains that it cannot connect to wpa_supplicant and is then stuck retrying indefinitely. ‘iw list’ shows the device and ‘iw dev wlc info’ spits out basic information about it, but I’ve been unable to get it to actually connect to anything. (Not helping is that net-tools doesn’t seem to come with the OS image, so no ifconfig )
I’ve found references online to some people needing to modify the source code for the driver to disable calibration & recompile, but those are from 2012-2016. (Plus, you need to download a bunch of stuff to do this & I don’t have network access without wifi so it’s a catch-22.)
Looked around in my boxes of computer stuff and found a Rosewill RNX-N150HG USB wifi dongle, which has an Atheros chipset. Plugged this in and am in the same exact situation, so seriously doubt it’s a driver issue.
Admittedly, I’ve never configured wifi on linux without ifconfig & iwconfig, so this could easily be something stupid I’m doing or not doing… commands I’m trying to use are ‘ip link set wlx up’ followed by ‘iw wlx connect’ (taken from stack exchange). Unfortunately, nothing works with either adapter.
Anyone have any tips or tricks that I could use to get one of these dongles working? Frankly, I’d like to get the one that came with the board functioning as it’s physically MUCH smaller than the Rosewill (which is nearly as big as the board!), plus it’ll be easier to just order another kit like I bought for each of the screens I’m going to end up needing to drive.
Thanks in advance.