TL-WN722N support on FreeBSD.

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2014 20:00:04 +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> For off-the-shelf no-name WLAN cards it is in my experience often difficult to
> tell which chipset is used inside. There have even been instances where
> manufacturers switch the chipset to something completely different without
> changing the part number!

Or they use a naming scheme that makes it easy to be confused
with "what you think it is". Many years ago, I wanted to buy
a Realtek RTL8029 network card. My local shop had them, with
the name "Net8029". So I bought one, but said I would return
it if it wasn't supported by the Realtek driver. And as you
may have guessed, "boot -v" later, it was a different chip,
and the driver didn't pick it up. I made an (impressive looking)
dotmatrix hardcopy of the boot process, marked the problem
with crayon, and returned the card. :-)



> > > I've been using IBM / Lenovo, Dell, Siemens-
> > > Fijutsu and Sony laptop hardware, and FreeBSD did not
> > > have any trouble getting the buildin hardware to work.
> > > Still there are models which cause problems: Some of
> > > them use chipsets not supported by current drivers, others
> > > just use f*cked up ACPI implementations, and others
> > > delegate hardware functionality to proprietary drivers
> > > which make the actual devices "appear" and "work", and
> > > as you will guess, those are only available for specific
> > > versions of "Windows".
> 
> Like winprinters. Blegh!

Yes, those are terrible and years behind technological evolution.
The same applies to "WinModems", a disease that development has
fortunately dealt with.

I remember that this kind of stupidity started (in the PC world)
on late DOS: Soundcards that no "driver" (sound subroutines in
the programs) would recognize until a DOS program, loaded via
CONFIG.SYS, would have sent a firmware to it, initialized and
enabled the card. Then everything worked as expected, a "Sound-
blaster or 100% compatible" was suddenly present. Of course I
never owned such a card myself. :-)



> > > It depends on you if you want to:
> > > 
> > > 	a) purchase other hardware to replace what is
> > > 	   not supported,
> > > 
> > > 	b) relapse to using Linux which supports your
> > > 	   hardware, or
> > > 
> > > 	c) accept that it's not working and make a better
> > > 	   choice next time you buy something. :-)
> 
> If I'm buying a PC or laptop I tend to go to a shop with a FreeBSD DVD or
> memstick and ask if I can try booting the machine in question from it. Then
> the dmesg output tells me what works and what doesn't.

That's what I also would suggest, and the promise of a successful
sale enables the clerks to quickly allow this test. A FreeBSD live
system such as FreeSBIE has been very useful in the past, sadly
they didn't update it past v5.



> Smaller shops can generally build PC's and sometimes laptops to order with
> components that you specify. That is generally what I do.

Me too, except that I still assemble the stuff myself. Yes, I haven't
got tired of this shit yet. ;-)



> > > FreeBSD isn't exactly blazing fast in this regards, but to me, never
> > > buying "the newest" for having "the newest" for few weeks (instead buying
> > > "good" in order to have "good" for several years), it doesn't really
> > > matter, so my opinion doesn't matter much.
> 
> Definitely agree. Never buy the latest generation hardware! You pay top dollar
> (especially for CPUs) and the difference to the previous generation that is
> probably better supported by FreeBSD is generally not really significant.

This is something I recently recognized: People spend lots of
money for "top notch CPUs" and systems, but the speed on which
the whole thing is working isn't any impressive. Especially when
loaded with "Windows", it's sometimes less than "what they had
before", and they start complaining. BUt hey, "it was expensive,
so it must be good!"

As with used office laser printers, buying "older" hardware for
much less money and relying on FreeBSD and its applications to
efficiently use those resources looks more appealing. Less money,
more usable power.



> These days the biggest speedup for a computer is probably to use an SSD instead
> of an HDD. But since GELI doesn't support TRIM yet, and I consider encryption a
> must have for my own data in case of theft, I'll wait for a while. Of course
> using a relatively small unencrypted SDD for the OS with an encrypted HDD for
> data would be a solution for that.

SSDs are becoming cheaper, and TRIM support will surely appear
in GELI, so if you can wait, wait a bit. And: Yes, SSDs for mass
storage are an improvement that you can actually see (see "newest
hardware" mentioned above).


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