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Created December 22, 2015 14:36
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Short guide to installing Linksys WUSB54GC v2 drivers on Windows 8
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wusb54gc-v2-on-windows-8.md

I haven't been able to find a working, pre-packaged driver for this WiFi stick at all. It seems that this revision (v2) was short-lived and its support was likewise. One can only find support articles for the original device revision ("v1") and the final one (v3), but not for v2. To add insult to injury, all revisions use different chipsets, which makes them totally different devices, not just "revisions", and -- by extension -- their drivers cannot be used interchangeably.

For tl;dr just scroll down to solution.

Why doesn't it work?!

There are quite a few links on the net that advertise as drivers for this particular model, but none of them worked for me. And in fact, the majority of them were in fact mislabeled v1 or v3 drivers.

Knowing, however, that what really matters is the chipset, I established that this particular device sports a Realtek RTL8187B chipset and went over to Realtek's website (RTL8187B downloads are down here), but the drivers from there wouldn't install, either. What the heck?!

I went on to inspect the .inf files and found that none of them actually refer to the USB vendor/product ID combination of the stick. I thought it may be worth it to wing it and spoof that ID pair, but to no avail: the digital signature file (.cat) distributed with the driver contains a hash for the .inf file, and obviously, changing the contents of that file creates a has mismatch. Luckily, this security mechanism can be circumvented. :)

Solution

  1. Download the RTL8187B driver from Realtek. At the time of writing, the newest version is 1182(Beta) from 2011/2/23.
  2. Extract it somewhere. Don't run the setup! Unless you want the Realtek "utility" crapware.
  3. Go to where you've extracted it and find the Driver directory.
  4. In that directory, find every instance of the file net8187b.inf.
  5. In every such file, after every such line (there are multiple instances!): %RTL8187B.DeviceDesc% = RTL8187B.ndi, USB\VID_0BDA&PID_8187&REV_0200 insert this: %RTL8187B.DeviceDesc% = RTL8187B.ndi, USB\VID_1737&PID_0073&REV_0200
  6. Reboot Windows in the mode that allows installing unsigned drivers (there are multiple guides on the internet).
  7. Open the Device Manager (from the Control Panel), find your device (should be showing up as a problematic device called RTL8187B_WLAN_Adapter), right-click it and choose Update driver software.
  8. Click Browse my computer for driver software and navigate to the Driver directory from step 3.
  9. Click Next and wait a few minutes. Your WUSB54GC v2 should start working now.
  10. Optional: If you're paranoid about security, reboot to re-enable driver signature checking.
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