Monday, December 21, 2015

Getting BeagleBone to recognize wifi adapters by upgrading the kernel

My beaglebone black wasn't recognizing my wifi adapter.  apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade didn't help, and I noticed that it wasn't upgrading the kernel.

Looks like the way to get kernel updates is to use /opt/scripts/tools/update_kernel.sh.  When I first tried it, I got errors like "The certificate of `rcn-ee.net' is not trusted".

So the first step was to "git pull" down the latest version of the update_kernel.sh script, then run it.  Upon reboot, it recognized the wifi adapter.

Also note that beaglebone doesn't always do USB hotplug right, so I made sure to reboot after plugging in the adapter.

Also, even after updating the kernel, my Edimax and D-Link adapters show up but won't associate to an access point.  The Keebox W150NU seems to be working well, though.

Update: Even with the W150NU, I had trouble connecting to public networks.  I noticed this in dmesg: "deauthenticating from by local choice (reason=3)", which led me to a page recommending that I kill wpa_supplicant, and that fixed it.

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