MOSUNX USB-C to 3 Port USB 3.0 + Hub Ethernet Adapter – Cable not connected (Ubuntu 16.04)

Lately I bought a “MOSUNX Futural Digital USB C to 3 Port USB 3.0 Hub 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter” over AliExpress. It’s available under different names and similar descriptions (Malloom, BGEKTOTH, iMice,…).

About the device itself: it seems to get pretty hot and experience disconnections on the network part (because of that?), so I don’t necessarily recommend it.

However the main issue was that it initially wasn’t working as should on my Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu 16.04. The device was properly recognised, but it kept showing ‘Cable disconnected’ (which was obviously incorrect). The USB hub worked fine at the same time.

It took me a little time to figure it out correctly, so I wanted to share the solution with you.

First of all, the adapter does show up nicely (among others):

> lsusb
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 05e3:0612 Genesys Logic, Inc. 
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e3:0610 Genesys Logic, Inc. 4-port hub

It seemed a driver issue, currently unresolved. So I downloaded the latest Linux driver for the RTL8153 chipset from Realtek: Link here (I downloaded version “LINUX driver for kernel up to 4.8”, 2.08.0)

This actually downloads you a .bz2 file (in my case 0007-r8152.53-2.08.0.bz2) which contains another file without extension (which appeared to be a .tar file).

Uncompressing the .bz2 resulted in a file named 0007-r8152.53-2.08.0 which I renamed into 0007-r8152.53-2.08.0.tar

After uncompressing this tar into a directory of your choice:

> make
> sudo make install

The connection neatly started to show up as should, properly showing a connected cable and functioning.