Problems with RTL8188EU based WiFi NIC

You know, LFS would probably benefit if there were something like a
lfs-hardware list, where people would talk about running LFS on all
sorts of exotic, strange, unusual, corners-were-cut-in-making-of-this,
windows-only and just plain broken hardware.

Right now I have a very peculiar problem. I went out and bought a D-Link
GO-USB-N150 which is a USB WiFi interface based on RTL8188EU. Of the
quite a few WiFi cards that were available I specifically chose this
one because I specifically read on Linux Mint forums that you can make
this card run on Linux.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=153544

As per the explanation up there, I patched the driver, compiled and
installed the module, put the firmware into the kernel image (normal
practice for me) and plugged in the card (stick). The module got loaded
(yay!) and initialized itself and the card (double yay!). Then I try to
go to the next step and run wpa_supplicant but get the following:

$wpa_supplicant -Dnl80211 -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant -d
Initializing interface 'wlan0' conf '/etc/wpa_supplicant' driver
'nl80211' ctrl_interface 'N/A' bridge 'N/A'
Configuration file '/etc/wpa_supplicant' -> '/etc/wpa_supplicant'
Reading configuration file '/etc/wpa_supplicant'
ctrl_interface='/var/run/wpa_supplicant.iface'
ctrl_interface_group='10'
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
Priority group 0
   id=0 ssid=''
nl80211: Failed to set interface 13 to mode 2: -19 (No such device)
nl80211: Failed to set interface 13 to mode 2: -19 (No such device)
nl80211: Interface mode change to 2 from 0 failed
nl80211: Could not configure driver to use managed mode
Failed to initialize driver interface
Failed to add interface wlan0
Cancelling scan request
Cancelling authentication timeout

Relevant output from ip:

13: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN qlen 1000
    link/ether [somemac] brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

The questions: does anyone have any idea on how to proceed? I looked a
bit in the source for the driver but can't figure it all out. What I
can see is that a lot of stuff has 'hal' in the name, but surely this
is not a reference to HAL, right? I'm supposed to be able to do
everything with udev, right?

In the sources for the driver, there is a package of hostap-0.8
together with some scripts for starting hostap. These scripts seem to
start hostap and set it to use something called rtl871xdrv as its
driver. However, the sources for wpa_supplicant-2.0 do not have any
mention of that string. Am I correct in trying to use nl80211 as the
driver?

Does anyone perhaps have an idea what Mint has and a barebones BLFS
does not? I keep thinking I am missing something that big distros (yes,
Mint is big now :) ) have.

I really don't expect a positive answer on this last one, but here goes
anyway: has anyone successfully run either GO-USB-N150 or something
else that uses RTL8188?

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