It appears that every OS available specifically for the M5 does have the driver and overlay available for the wifi/bt module specifically for the M5 but for some reason isn’t setup to automatically load the driver itself). I thought the card was broken until I found out how to get it working. The WiFi is much better, bluetooth 4.0 works great, and I freed up a USB port when I no longer needed the dongle.
Here’s what you do…and this has worked on every image, including the “thanks to open source” images.
modify /boot/boot.ini by modifying the following line (typically line 96) and add the wifi_bt_rtl8822cs overlay driver like this:
setenv overlays "i2c0 spi0 uart1 wifi_bt_rtl8822cs"
driver overlay can be manually loaded with command ‘modprobe 88x2cs’ but it’s better to also add to /etc/modules so it loads at every boot. (the modprobe command will immediately load the drivers and enable wifi without a reboot):
vi /etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf
# append the following line to the end of modules.conf:
88x2cs
I can put together a one liner to do this automatically if anyone would like to just run “sudo [paste the one liner]>” but it’s so easy to just manually do it…like once every blue moon.