by jiml8 » Jul 6th, '18, 20:30
rtl8192cu and rtl8192eu are different chips. Neither are firmware, although both need to have firmware uploaded to them from the host.
I was just reading the driver source provided with the mageia kernel, and it appears that the rtl8192eu is supposed to be supported by the rtl8xxxu driver. I will note, though, that the Kconfig file does not list the 8192EU as a supported chip, and there are some comments in the driver code that make me think this is a bit experimental.
Now, I have a lot of experience with these particular chips, but almost exclusively in a FreeBSD environment. I do have an 8192eu sitting here, though, and I plugged it into my workstation to see what would happen. The kernel promptly loaded the rtl8xxxu driver for it. My networking setup on the workstation is not conducive to easily testing this type of device; I use my workstation for other things. Most particularly, I do not use network manager on my workstation, so when the device was identified, no interface appeared when I did ifconfig. I would have to manually set that up and I don't really know how to and don't want to take the time to figure it out.
So, I plugged it into my laptop which runs OpenSUSE Leap 15 and does use network manager. My laptop promptly identified the device and a new interface (wlan4) appeared when I did an ifconfig.
I attempted to connect using this wifi dongle to two different access points which are available to me, and the device would not connect, although all configuration looked correct. According to the journal, it was failing authentication, although all of that was defined correctly.
So, I can confirm that the rtl8xxxu driver is the correct one, but it does not appear to work.
Now, on FreeBSD, I found that the driver that worked for the 8192CU would not attach to the 8192EU, and I altered that driver so it would attach, and it then crashed the kernel when it attached. I did not pursue it further; we are now using 8188CU, 8188CUS, and 8192CU chips in our product and not using the 8192EU.
The 8192EU is a new chip and I don't think support is complete for Linux. I know it works in Windows and I think it works in OS-X but I am not certain of that.
I suggest you get a different dongle. The RTL8192CU does work with Linux.