argh with freebsd's networking!

[Jeff D. Hamann]

I've been a big fan of FreeBSD for a few years now, expect for the fact that 
getting a NIC is always a gamble. Since time is limtied (and most costly) I 
can't afford to spend another minute trying to get my new laptop up and 
running with FreeBSD.

I've recently purchased a laptop (sager 3880 -- very nice so far) and have 
had no success getting either the rj-45 network interface ot the wireless 
interface (Intel 2915abg) to work. When I run the install, it does detect a 
ethernet-firewire device (fwe0) and I have no idea how to use that. 
Regardless, I've found a couple of references to the to the network drivers 
found at

http://damien.bergamini.free.fr/ipw/iwi-freebsd.html

the instructions seem to be clear enough but the problem is is that I don't 
have any network connection so I can't install ports and packages. I can't 
find instructions clear enough to be able to at least get one of the network 
devices running Are not sure which set of instructions are the appropriate 
ones.  I've got an old PC card wireless network card (netgear ma401 --  
16-bit)  and tried to hook that up to my network which has wep security and 
had difficulty getting that to work. I'm experienced enough to be able to 
recompile the kernel so if that's the hang up that's no problem but I simply 
need a way to get either support or the package onto the machine. 
Unfortunately the machine doesn't have a floppy drive and the USB support 
seems to be shaky at best so I've created a dual boot machine with the fat32 
file system to it least get files into FreeBSD. I've wasted at least a day 
and a half on this and I can't spend anymore time on this and I'm getting 
really bummed since I won't be able to run FreeBSD on the new machine. If 
anyone has any meaningful assistance in getting the wireless or the wired 
ethernet working please assist.

I'm using FreeBSD 6.0 i386. I downloaded the ISO images last week.  I would 
love to recompile the kernel so that neither works.

Thanks,
Jeff.