Ok, well I had a nice long post typed out here (twice now, but I copied most of it before I hit the stupid key this time) with lots of details and useless additives; however I hit the stupid "back" button that IBM thought would be a good idea to put on the key board of this laptop right next to the up arrow... and so it is gone.

this will have to be a quick version, minus some heavily laden with porn russian websites (oh! there was also one trying to sell an iphone x-ray vision app too!!!) I can find zero info on this chipset, I have a Encore Electronics ENLWI-NX2 802.11n PCI card, works in Win7 AFTER running their config/setup progy. Shows up in pciconf with class, card, chip, rev, and hdr hex codes, and a vendor and class listing, but nothing else. It shows up in windows as an RTL8190P, I was unsuccessful in finding it in FreeBSD 8.0 x64; but I may have forgotten to capitalize the "R" in Realtek when I grepped the "pciconf -lv" results.

manufacturer product page: http://www.encore-usa.com/product_item.php?region=us&bid=2&pgid=81_2&pid=412

I followed the ndisgen instructions posted in this forum by sqlbsd, and all went well until I tried to load the RTL8190P_sys file, then the system hangs for 3-6 seconds and finally the PC just shut off. So a bit more PC info... I tried running FreeBSD 8.0 x64 first, but did not even find the card listed in pciconf (or dmesg) when I grepped for Realtek (maybe I forgot to capitalize the "R"? but either way I didn't see it, and although I got KDE setup and it booted to the login screen, I could not log in, the KB and mouse only worked on the console screens, so I came back to DesktopBSD). So, I have a clean DesktopBSD 1.7 x64 install on my machine, only 1 network card and it is this wireless card.

I am going to try the 32bit drivers, the win 2k drivers, and then the vista drivers that shipped with the card. I also have the setup file from the manufacturer's website DL'd and will check that for a different version. if anyone has any ideas I'd be happy to give them a go. I may try an Ubuntu Live CD to check if it will recognize the card, also puppy linux tends to find wifi cards out of the box, so I may give that a shot and see if I can figure out which drivers they use.

I knew I should have just bought the 802.11g card... but I had to go with the 802.11n just cuz it was the same price... and had MIMO support...


****edit 10 minutes later****
I did notice that the Encore ENLWI-G is listed on the FreeBSD 7.2 Hardware list, so there is hope...

****update 8:12pm EST****
So, the newly downloaded drivers from the website were slightly more generic (RTL819xP drivers) but they are 7 months newer, so I tried them. The Win64 failed to convert invalid syntax line 2355 or so, the the winxp2k drivers loaded fine, but failed to create the .ko file. The vista x64 drivers converted with no errors and loaded without crashing the PC; however the system still does not recognize the wireless card. so I guess I move on to something else?

****update 3-12-2010****
I have tried all of the drivers the system came with, the set I downloaded from the manufacturer, and the ones I downloaded from realtek. All the windows XP drivers fail to create the .ko file, all of the windows Vista and Windows 7 drivers convert with no error and load with no error. ifconfig does not show the wireless adapter and pciconf does not show any additional details for the adapter. No matter which drivers I try to load.