Wireless Network / WPA / ipw

[Fernan Aguero]

+----[ Marc Fonvieille <blackend at freebsd.org> (05.Feb.2007 16:29):
|

[snipped]

| > Hi [ me jumping into the discussion ]
| > 
| > great article! it's a very welcome addition to the doc set.
| > 
| > I've been hesitating to install FreeBSD on my laptop cause 
| > I never found good enough documentation on how to set up 
| > the wireless card or if it would work at all ... now I'm
| > closer to wanting to try it out!
| > 
| > One thing that I (a newcomer to the wifi world) would look
| > for in the article is if my card is supported. 

[snipped]

| Please, read the "official" and supported doc:
| http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-wireless.html
| 
| which states: "A list of available wireless drivers can be found at
| the beginning of the wlan(4) manual page. If a native FreeBSD driver for
| your wireless device does not exist, it may be possible to directly use
| the Windows® driver with the help of the NDIS driver wrapper."
| 
| and which describes what need to be added to loader.conf and/or to the
| kernel config file, etc.
|
+----]

Thanks for the pointer! 

I've read the wlan(4) man page and all the pages mentioned
there and so far other Intel Pro Wireless cards seem to have
drivers, but the IPW 3945abg does not, or at least it is not
mentioned specifically.

Nor is it mentioned here
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.2R/hardware-i386.html#WLAN

So, perhaps I'll have to go with the NDIS wrapper. But I'd
love to hear from someone with a centrino laptop to see if
there's any chance of getting it to work. 

A quick search of the archives reveals questions from
people inquiring about the status of the drivers, but so far
no report of success.

Thanks again,

Fernan