I was contemplating on reviving an aging Dell Optiplex 7010 back home, so I bought myself a cheap Wifi and Bluetooth USB adapter from Lazada for it. I did my research so I knew that the adapter is compatible with Windows, and compatibility with Linux was never mentioned. But as with pretty much any device in the Linux world, I’m positive that someone out there has already tinkered with getting it working for them.
The backstory
The main thing about the Optiplex was that it has an aging i7 3770s processor. It is not compatible with Windows 11. I can use Windows 10, but only until its extended support on October 2026. After that, I’m SOL. So I figured I could use Linux Mint instead until it dies. Therein lies the problem.
I excitedly installed Mint Cinnamon 22.3 (the latest as of writing) and sure enough, the machine was blazing fast despite its age. Of course, I used a SATA SSD in place of the HDD to get it this fast. If you are upgrading an old machine, I highly recommend doing this because the difference is day and night!
So now comes the fun part – getting the adapter to work!
What happened
This adapter is a cheap Wifi and Bluetooth combo USB adapter from Lazada. The branding is weird probably because this was OEM’d from an Alibaba supplier or something:
KEBETEME WIFI 6 AX900 USB Adapter Bluetooth 5.4 Wireless Network Card 2.4G&5GHz Wi-Fi Antenna USB For PC/Laptop Win10/11 Driver Free
lsusb would identify it as ID 1111:1111 Pandora International Ltd. 88M80
When I plugged in adapter in the USB port, I heard a ding. Promising. A couple of seconds later, a window popped up with a mounted disk, with a single EXE file that I obviously could not run. It turns out that it is the Windows driver installer. Needless to say, it is useless to me.
So I am facing two dilemmas right now:
- How to switch this to Wifi/bt mode, and
- How to get wifi and bluetooth working
I scoured the internet forums and reddits and stack exchange — and just out of curiosity, even asked Gemini and ChatGPT if they know how to make it work. They ended up giving me instructions that were mashed up from the different forums and reddits I saw, and ended up with still a nonworking adapter. So I went on reading the forums to try and find the right driver. There were lots of them, but only some would compile. Others would compile but not detect the device. After trying out pretty much the top 3, I found one that actually works! And bonus – all the other drivers had the wifi, but no bluetooth, but this one has both! Lucky me!
I would not have known it worked though, not until I found the solution to #1.
I learned that the adapter is a dual-mode usb device. The two modes are USB mass storage and Wifi/bluetooth adapter. In Linux, there is supposed to be a utility called usb-modeswitch that can automatically detect the device and switch it to Wifi/bluetooth, but for some reason, it is not working. It turns out, this device has a vendorId of 1111 and productId of 1111, sort of like a dummy number. I suppose this is what happens when you cheap out on your equipment. Anyway, so you need to tell usbmodeswitch to automatically switch it to wifi when it is plugged in, and you need to edit a config file for this. So I did. So now when I plug the adapter in, I don’t hear the ding, but now I can see the Wifi logo and bluetooth come up!
After switching it to Wifi/Bluetooth mode, I can now see the real USB info from lsusb:
ID a69c:8d80 aicsemi AIC Wlan
I hurriedly try to connect to the my WiFi and also paired the Bluetooth to my Bose speakers. One thing I learned here is that Wifi can only run up to around 120Mbps download, and bluetooth has this profile thing where if you use both audio in and out, you will end up with call quality audio, even when playing media. So I opted to use audio only and chose SBC-XQ, and this time it sounded great!
What to do
So to make this long story short, here is what you should do to get this device to work:
- Make sure you have the same device. You can run
lsusband you should see something that looks like this:ID 1111:1111 Pandora International Ltd. 88M80 - When you plug in the device, you should see a USB mass storage. You can try switching it to Wifi/BT mode by running the following command:
sudo usb_modeswitch -v 1111 -p 1111 -M "555342438765432100000000000010fd0000000000000000000000000000f2" - If it switched, you should no longer see the USB mass storage, and when you
lsusb, you will see this entry:ID a69c:8d80 aicsemi AIC Wlan - Since we have not installed the drivers yet, we don’t expect this to work. To install the driver, this is the one that worked for me:
git clone https://github.com/shenmintao/aic8800d80.git- cd to the cloned folder, and run
sudo ./install.sh
- At this point, you should see the Wifi and bluetooth icon, which means the system is now able to detect the adapter. If not, you can try unplugging it, then replugging it, but you will have to redo #2 to switch it again.
- To automate usb-modeswitch, do the following:
- Open
/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.ruleswith nano in sudo mode and add the following line:ATTR{idVendor}=="1111", ATTR{idProduct}=="1111", RUN+="usb_modeswitch '/%k'" - Create a file /usr/share/usb_modeswitch/1111:1111 with this content:
- Open
TargetVendor=0xa69c
TargetProduct=0x8d80
MessageContent="555342438765432100000000000010fd0000000000000000000000000000f2"
7. You can try removing the adapter and plugging it back in. Now you should see the WiFi and Bluetooth icons on your system tray. To be very sure, you can try rebooting your machine. You should still see them after that.
Conclusion
Cheap USB devices can be a pain to use in Linux for the very reason that the manufacturer does not bother to include Linux driver binaries. Good thing the Linux community always finds fascination in finding solutions to problems. While this sounds like a promotion, it is entirely up to you if you like this kind of exercise, or if you don’t want to spend more money. For me, I would not buy this again, not because of the difficulty using it in Linux, but because the actual speed did not reach the advertised speed, like not even close. I felt duped. Then again, I spent just around Php 140 on it (roughly two dollars and some change) on a WiFi and Bluetooth in one. Not too bad for the price.
Product links:
https://s.lazada.com.ph/s.Zavdl9?cc&t=p-i5gANAe-sXfkwqr
Helpful sources:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/aic8800d80-dkms
https://github.com/radxa-pkg/aic8800/issues/68
https://github.com/shenmintao/aic8800d80