Drivers installed but not "loaded"

[stevef]

Jim,

Happy to try to help, but not having the same hardware makes things difficult.  Also, if we can't establish how far you got in installing the wrong drivers, there may be complications....

First off, the BCM5906M interface is not the USB dongle.  The BCM5906M is the hardware behind the physical RJ45-type socket into which you plug an ethernet cable.  You'll notice it doesn't show in the USB list. The driver for that hardware has been included in the linux kernel for some time and we don't need to worry about it.

The relevant bit from the lsusb command is

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0bda:b812 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL88x2bu [AC1200 Techkey]

If you search for that hardware in the 'Hardware for Linux' page that you linked to there are mixed results but there are enough 'works' status and references in the Linux Lite hardware database to be optimistic.

There seem to be several projects on Github for RTL88x2bu drivers.  Having had a quick look, the 'morrownr' project looks like the one I'd select in your position.

https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu-20210702

Take a look at this and see if you trust it.

Before starting, I'd

1) Ensure LL is updated.
2) Make a system snapshot (timeshift) and run backups (dejadup) for potential rollback
3) Reboot

The instructions below are adapted from 'Installation Steps' from the link https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu-20210702 to try to remove the steps which aren't relevant, if in doubt, follow the github method.

Open a terminal and run the following commands one at a time.

Code:

sudo apt install -y build-essential dkms git

This ensures you have the utilities needed, you may already have some of them.

Code:

mkdir -p ~/src

This makes a directory called 'src' in your home folder.

Code:

cd ~/src

This changes your terminal session to the folder you just made

Code:

git clone https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu-20210702.git

This downloads the driver to the folder

Code:

cd ~/src/88x2bu-20210702

This changes your terminal session to the driver folder

Code:

sudo ./install-driver.sh

Run the installation script

Follow the instructions in the script.