Some detective work is needed, try this to determine exactly which driver and firmware is in use by any wifi and ethernet devices.
Be on the lookout for any conflicting internal wifi devices especially if we are using a notebook, some motherboards may also have wifi adapters
for a broader view you could try these first
lspci -vv
lsusb -v
Then I would filter these results with
lspci -v | grep -i -e wifi -e eth -e driver
and
lsusb -v | grep -i wlan
which provides for example:
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300
Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 02)
Kernel driver in use: r8168
and
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter
idProduct 0x8176 RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter
iProduct 2 802.11n WLAN Adapter
Then search dmesg for the above 3 devices
dmesg | grep -i -e wifi -e rtl
example
eth%d: RTL8168C/8111C at 0xf8034000, 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, IRQ 47
eth0: Identified chip type is 'RTL8168C/8111C'.
iwlagn: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, in-tree:
iwlagn 0000:06:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 AGN, REV=0x24
rtl8192cu: MAC address: 00:9c:91:99:c4:88
rtl8192cu: Board Type 0
rtl8192cu: rx_max_size 15360, rx_urb_num 8, in_ep 1
ieee80211 phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'rtl_rc'
usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8192cu
rtl8192cu: MAC auto ON okay!
rtl8192cu: Tx queue select: 0x05
rtl8192c: Loading firmware file rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw.bin
Also view
lsmod
Module Size Used by Tainted: P
...
iwlagn 122880 0
rtl8192cu 65536 0
rtlwifi 65536 1 rtl8192cu
rtl8192c_common 40960 1 rtl8192cu
mac80211 114688 4 iwlagn,rtl8192cu,rtlwifi,rtl8192c_common
cfg80211 94208 3 iwlagn,rtlwifi,mac80211
r8168 208896 0
...
As you can see, the internal
Intel(R) Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300 device has it's driver (iwlagn) installed but is not in use, also
the RTL8168C Ethernet adapter has a driver (r8168) installed but is not in use. However,
the RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter has loaded it's rtl8192cu driver, rtl8192cufw.bin firmware, and it's dependencies rtlwifi core, rtl8192c_common, mac80211 and cfg80211.
searching for driver and firmware files in APPS confirms the required rtlwifi, rtl8192cu, rtl8192cufw.bin, mac80211 and cfg80211 files are available in wireless-3.0.21-tinycore.tcz and firmware.tcz for this device