need to get updates, packages, ports, etc. via Windows XP wireless

[Scott Bennett]

     Here's my situation:  I have a nearly two-year-old Inspiron XPS with a
Dell 1450 dual-band wireless card and a Mobility Radeon 9800 graphics card.
FreeBSD's support for these is insufficient to make the system useful under
FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE, which I recently installed to replace 5.4.  At present
my only access to the Internet is via wireless services.
     For the graphics card, there is still no native support for 3-D
operations, and the version of X.org that is bundled with FreeBSD 6.1 does not
include the MESA 3-D support.  I don't like this, but I can live with it for
the moment.
     For the wireless card, there is no native support, and the NDISulator
method did not work as recently as 5.4.  Using ndisgen in 6.1, I now get an
error message telling me that the bcmwl5.inf file is in the wrong character
set and that I should use iconv to convert it to the proper character set.
However, iconv is a tool that is not part of the FreeBSD base system, but
rather must be installed from the ports tree (or maybe also available in
packages--I don't know).
     To install ports or packages requires Internet access, which I don't
have in FreeBSD until I have wireless support, which I can't even try to get
until I have the software downloaded to work with.
     Is there a workable procedure to use to get FreeBSD updates, packages,
port source files, and so forth downloaded under Windows XP, which does have
working wireless support, so that I can try to make 6.1 useful?


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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* Internet:       bennett at cs.niu.edu                              *
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