Finding Drivers For winWiFi Card

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:35:32 -0600, Programmer In Training <pit at joseph-a-nagy-jr.us> wrote:
> I hope ifconfig will help more then dmesg as I have no way of getting
> files (like dmesg.log that I created) off the box (floppy drive isn't
> even hooked up, IIRC) and rl0 is my wired NIC, non-internal.

The ifconfig program (often used as "ifconfig -a") tells
you only about NICs that are already connected to a driver.
Most wireless NICs require loading a specific kernel module
(which is not in the GENERIC kernel), and therefore it's
helpful to know what exact model it is, so you can load the
correct driver. There are of course programs that help you
with this: "pciconf -lv" and "usbdevs -v" are common tools
for this particular tasks. As soon as you can tell what the
name of the wireless NIC is, you can check which driver it
needs and the load it, e. g. with "kldload if_bge.ko", where
"bge" is the name of the driver (remember to check "man bge"
to see what it is intended for). As soon as you've loaded
it, "dmesg" will show its existance and "ifconfig -a" will
print its settings.

PS. The plip0 interface is the "printer port Internet Protocol
    driver".



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...