Making the Netgear A6210 AC1200 Wifi Adapter Work With YABU

Anyone who has tried a YABU (Yet Another uBUntu) based on Ubuntu 16.x knows they really hosed wireless networking. My HP laptop has become almost unusable when it comes to checking email or writing a blog post in bed. It was fine before this debacle. Given that Ubuntu 16.04 has been out for 8 months I don’t really see any light at the end of this particular tunnel. This finally pushed me to get a Netgear AC1200 USB Wifi adapter.

I might have been able to use one of my older external adapters, but, none of them went up to even wireless N so I might as well make the leap to AC1200 which is what my routers are. Does a geek really need an excuse to buy a new toy?

I plugged it into my laptop and was met with the deafening sound of silence followed by zero notification popups. Yes, not only is wireless networking really hosed in YABU distros based on 16.x, they didn’t roll in the driver from Netgear.

This particular adapter and Ubuntu is a shining example of just how worthless Google really is. Instead of returning the link with instructions on how to make this work, it returns a bunch of links with messages posted by various people saying this device only works with Windows and MAC per official contact from Netgear.

Here is a news flash for the uneducated. Apple does not have its own operating system. They have a hacked up custom port of BSD and are pretty much the only ones running the thing. Click the link if you want to view the history. Suffice it to say it is a fork of the original AT&T Unix and Linux is “unix like” so most of the links Google offered up really should be purged from the Internet.

Eventually, if you use a good search engine, you get offered up a link which tells you where the code is in github. I had a pretty clean install of Linux Lite on the laptop so here are the instructions that I just ran through.


sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/jurobystricky/Netgear-A6210
cd Netgear-A6210/
make
sudo make install
reboot


 After rebooting plug in the device and wait a bit. Click on your wireless network icon and you will most likely see the device listed as “not managed.”

cd /
sudo find -iname networkmanager.conf
./etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf
^C
sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf


Find the tag and “managed=” line listed below and change false to true then save the file and exit.

[ifupdown]
managed=true


Now restart the network manager:
sudo service network-manager restart
All should be working now.