Recently my laptop’s WiFi stopped working and I had to look for an alternative. Decided to go with a USB WiFi adapter since that’s the easiest and the quickest option. The adapter I went for was the Prolink DH-5102U since it supposedly shipped a Linux driver. I’m using both Arch Linux and Windows. So it was pretty important that the adapter works in both environments. In Windows it wasn’t an issue and I was up and running in no time. But getting it set up in Arch Linux turned out to be tricky since the provided Linux driver wasn’t building on this environment. The provided driver was for an older kernel version and apparently not compatible with 5.18.

Upon further inspection it turned out to be that this adapter was based on the RTL8821CU chipset and came across the following repo which maintains a driver for it: https://github.com/brektrou/rtl8821CU. But attempts to build the driver from this was also unsuccessful. But luckily, it turned out that there was a driver maintained in Arch Linux repository for the RTL8821CU chipset: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rtl8821cu-dkms-git. Even this is not yet updated to support 5.18. But apparently a user has tried out a fix for it as pointed out in https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rtl8821cu-dkms-git#comment-872195. I tried it out as instructed in the comment and the driver built and installed without any issue and it’s working! Posting this as a blog post in case anyone else run into trouble with the Prolink WiFi adapters in Linux.