I just happen to have one of these WiFi/Bluetooth dongles lying around, and my desktop doesn't have either of these features built in. I don't really need WiFi nor Bluetooth, but it seemed like a fun idea to get this dongle, designed for a VoIP box, to work on my bog-standard Linux system.

Bluetooth was very, very easy. I did it quite a while ago, but I don't think any drivers per se were required. For all intents and purposes, it was plug-and-play, but on Arch I had to install the Bluetooth libraries or daemon or something like that—which doesn't really have much to do with the Ooma dongle specifically.

I don't want this to be "blog-spam," so I'll try to make it quick for the WiFi. It took some time to figure it out (this helped a little bit), but disassembling the dongle to find out what the chip model was was ultimately what told me how to make it work.

Effectively, this is what you do:

  1. Install a driver for the rtl8192cu. On Arch Linux, the driver I used was the 8192cu-dkms one, which is available in the AUR. There's a possibility that this is actually in the kernel (here), but I'm not 100% sure (I also read somewhere that the rtl8192cu driver in the kernel has random problems.)

  2. Put this text in a file in /etc/udev.d/rules/ (eg. create /etc/udev.d/rules/50-ooma-wifi.rules):

    ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="226a", ATTR{idProduct}=="817b", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe -qba 8192cu", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 226a 817b > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/rtl8192cu/new_id'"

    What this does is it tells the rtl8192cu driver to load the driver for the Ooma WiFi USB device. We have to do this since Ooma's USB device ID isn't in the list of devices that the driver will automatically load the driver for, so we have to force it to load.

Reboot your computer, and it should work.

Alternatively, you can reload udev with sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger and unplug and plug back in the dongle.

Also, I think if you want to make this work on Windows, you could do something similar (install the corresponding rtl8192cu driver, then go into Device Manager and make the WiFi device use that rtl8192cu driver using "Update Driver" or whatever).