Wifi dongle not working on Ubuntu Vivid

nikkoaki

Greetings,
First of all, excuse my poor english.. also, i'm a newbie in anything related to linux so forgive anything silly i might say.

I have been running my OPI-PC with loboris' vivid minimal image (headless) for a long time now. Its connected 24/7 and i never had any major problem with it until now.
I tried a rtl8192 based dongle to see if i could change from wired to wifi but it's not working unfortunately.

dmesg

1. [  138.988130] rtl8192cu: Loading firmware rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin
   
2. [  138.988423] usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8192cu
   
3. [  138.989586] rtlwifi: Firmware rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin not available

Copy code

I already googled about the problem and most of you already know it's not because i lack the firmware (the file is there) but because there is something wrong with the kernel/systemd.. (example: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepi ... wthread&tid=968).
I know that most of you will just advise me to change to armbian because it works there and the project is not dead, the problem is that it took me a lot of time to have the system running as it is now. Sure, some things i could just backup the config files/scripts and use in the new distro but i can't for most of the things. If i had a second OPI i could take some time and configure everything there again without having any downtime on my main one but i don't.
I tried patching the kernel with the instructions that jernej gave in that last link i posted but i have 2 problems: the link he gives is dead (but i think the new one is https://github.com/jernejsk/Open ... ts/H3/patches/linux), anyway, the first problem is that the patch doesn't apply 100% successfully, one of the hunks fails. The second problem: I can't compile loboris kernel and i don't know why because i suck at this. Everytime a new error occurs and i fix it, a new one appears. It seems to be related to the gcc version, from what i've gathered, i need a specific version.. anyway, 3 hours later i just gave up. I was using lubuntu 64bits on a VM.  I can build the mainline kernel with no problems.
My question is, is there an easier way of making this work? Screwing up something is ok since i have an image backup of the sd card so i can always just burn it back with almost no downtime. If not, i'll just forget it and keep using it wired.

Thanks in advance.