I wish “Firmware Package” had the RTL8821AE wireless network adaptor driver.

[Dave H]

My Wife’s laptop is an Asus X555L, it has a RTL8821AE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter. When I first installed Ubuntu-Mate 16.04 for her, the Wireless Network adaptor driver was part of the Kernel. Her wireless connection reliability was terrible, continually dropping connection. It also connects sometimes at really low data rate, sometimes as low as 6bits/s (my laptop always connects at min 150Mb/s). She has been Ethernet cabled to my LAN Switch for the last 6 months until I Googled for a driver and found a post pointing to a driver by Lwfinger on github. See:

http://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new.git

Please can the Mate “Firmware Package” include a driver for RTL8821AE wireless network adaptor. This would help all users with an Asus x555 series Laptops.

[James Cameron (quozl)]

Dave, Lwfinger is Larry Finger, the maintainer of the rtl8821ae driver already in Ubuntu 16.04. When you used his GitHub driver, you had undone a change by Realtek, and that's why it worked. The Realtek change was 40b368af4b75 ("rtlwifi: Fix alignment issues") and caused the connection loss.

Larry Finger and I have worked on the connection loss in the past few weeks. Linux kernel v4.14 when it is released should contain a fix b8b8b16352cd ("rtlwifi: rtl8821ae: Fix connection lost problem"). But there's nothing wrong with continuing with the GitHub driver if it is working fine for you.

Martin, package linux-firmware-1.168 and earlier versions have the rtl8821ae firmware for the wireless network adapter. So I don't think this bug should "affects" linux-firmware or linux-firmware-nonfree.