Wireless NIC are nice, just not on Linux
I’ve been collecting TinyMiniMicro computers like Infinity Stones. Just kidding, I’m just on my second one.
But the house I live in doesn’t make it easy to move a LAN cable to another corner where my desk is – and where I keep my home-servers as well. And most of the used mini/micro computers don’t come with NICs inside. So one has to either get USB or PCI-e network adapters.
I haven’t explored the PCI-e ones, but this note tries to save some hours for you by listing the steps required to get such devices working on Debian and on NixOS, because the downloadable adapters from official websites aren’t upto date with recent kernel versions.
Debian
This repository on GitHub has instructions that’ll work for any Linux distro, however I’ve only installed with Debian 13 and DKMS.
One has to reboot for the network adapters to work.
NixOS
There would already be NIC drivers for your USB/PCI-e adapters and one can search them by the name of their chip in search.nixos.org.
In your configuration.nix one has to add
boot.extraModulePackages = [ config.boot.kernelPackages.rtl8821au ];
The name rtl8821au comes from the name of the chip, and varies according to the device you want to use.