Wireless Support

DesktopBSD 1.6 (FreeBSD 6.2 stable) supports the following wireless cards out of the box. Support for some other cards is available using third-party drivers or ndiscvt, but the following cards should suit you best if want an easy installation without hassle.

• Atheros AR5210, AR5211, and AR5212 chips
• Hermes, Prism and Spectrum24 chips
• Ralink, RT2500, RT2501, und RT2600 Chipsätze
• Ralink, USB Wlan, RT2500USB Chipsatz.
• IPW, Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 IEEE 802.11 Treiber
• IWI, Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG IEEE 802.11 Treiber
• WI, Lucent Hermes, Intersil PRISM und Spectrum24 IEEE 802.11 Treiber

• Aironet 4500/4800
• AMD PCnetMobile
• Netwave AirSurfer

Driver for Intel WLan 3945:

WPI, Intel 3945

Not really usable, quiet unstable.

And there is rum for Ralinks rt73 chipsets (USB wlan). It's rather usable in FreeBSD 7 (current), but I don't know whether it will be backported to FreeBSD 6.2. So at the moment I would strongly avoid any USB wlan stick. In the end there is just support for Ralink chipsets.

This section explains the basis. However, I would like to add tips for DesktopBSD 1.6. First of all, DesktopBSD 1.6 from CD install doesn't include source. So ndisgen will fail with this error: <code>Building kernel module… ”/usr/share/mk/bsd.kmod.mk”, line 12: “can't find kernel source tree”<code> So you have to get sources for base and sys as described here in the note of the 3rd paragraph.

Tip: Getting sources from FreeBSD 6.3, you will need to go into Options of sysinstall and change the Release name to match 6.3-RELEASE instead of 6.3-RC2 in order to correctly install the paquets.

Then ndisgen should work fine. For wpa networks you will also need to install wpa_supplicant and libdnet paquets. Then, This method should work fine.

Comparison of open source wireless drivers (FreeBSD)

BSDGroup: FreeBSD laptop database and PCMCIA cards

• Bus: How the card is connected to the computer.
  • PCI cards are inserted in expansion slots in desktop computers.
  • PCMCIA (also known as PC card or Cardbus) are most commonly used in mobile devices such as laptop computers.
  • CF (CompactFlash) cards are even smaller than PCMCIA cards and can be used with a suitable card reader.
• Standard: The supported 802.11 protocol. Protocols differ in range, frequency and data rate.
  • 802.11 Legacy: Up to 2 MBit/s
  • 802.11a: Up to 54 MBit/s
  • 802.11b: Up to 11 MBit/s
  • 802.11g: Up to 54 MBit/s
  • 802.11n (available in first versions): Up to 540 MBit/s

NOTE: Atheros provides a more up-to-date list of cards based on their chips.