How do I get my wireless USB adapter to show up in Kali Linux?

Question

I just received my PAU05 USB wifi adapter today and after installing some drivers I got the device to work just fine in Kali Linux (I did some wireless pen testing with no problems.) However when I restarted my PC today and went to boot up Kali Linux in my VirtualBox machine it found my device, but it is no longer showing as wlan0 in console. I think it may be a driver issue but I'm not entirely sure.

Edit: I am using a virtual machine and I believe I might have the answer. When I received the device I plugged it in my laptop before installing the drivers prompting Windows to install the device by itself. That in turn caused my internal wifi adapter driver to be changed as seen here.

Now this is just a theory, but I think it may have to do with the drivers conflicting? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Be sure your wifi dongle appears to be up.

iwconfig

Check if your wifi dongle appears, what it is the name is using and if it is up. Let's imagine it is wlan0.

sudo ifup wlan0

It it was the problem, it should work fine

Answer 2

Everytime you boot an OS from an ISO, you need to install ALL apps and drivers AGAIN. The solution to this is creating a persistence partition on a Live Boot USB.

[http://docs.kali.org/downloading/kali-linux-live-usb-persistence ]

[http://docs.kali.org/kali-dojo/03-kali-linux-usb-persistence-encryption ]

Answer 3

If you are using in virtual machine you need to get external Wi-Fi adapter, your built-in Wi-Fi adapter cannot be read by the guest OS, in your case the Kali Linux.