cheap (supported) wifi card

[Adam J Richardson]

Steve Franks wrote:
> Don,
> 
> I notice a earlier poster mentioned >  > work very well with ndisgen.
> 
> I think you've been misled.  That means you have to go thru several
> manual steps to smash the windows drivers into something freebsd can
> use.  Ugly, in my opinion.  If you want it to work 'out of the box',
> go back and buy a card with a prisim/orinoco or atheros chipset.  If
> you want to make your existing dongle work, look for ndisgen in the
> handbook in the 'wireless networking' section.
> 
> Steve

Hi Steve.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'misled'. I'm not relating someone else's 
experiences. I really have had very good results with Project 
Evil/ndisgen. Those cards I mentioned can function perfectly well.

Though I note the TNET1130, just to spite me, has stopped working since 
I upgraded to 6.2-RELEASE-p7. Maybe I need to re-Evil it.

You're right that shoehorning XP drivers into BSD is painful. It's 
annoying to find the XP driver, then copy it to FAT to copy it to UFS, 
then wrap it with ndisgen. After that, it functions like any other 
driver ["sudo kldload if_ndis", etc].

Native drivers would be better. I don't have the experience to write 
them though. Project Evil is better than nothing, specially if it works 
well. Actually this whole discussion might well be moot, because in the 
specific case of the F5D7051, native drivers are coming in the form of 
[if I read correctly] if_ural and if_rum.

Btw, my last email implied that the F5D7051 is based on the TNET1130 
chipset. That was wrong. Apologies. It's actually a Broadcom chip.

Regards,
Adam J Richardson