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JonathanBSD
April 16th, 2012, 18:18
Hi all,

I'm a complete beginner in FreeBSD systems and I'm having trouble getting my wireless to work. I am using FreeBSD 9.0 on a Toshiba l505 Satellite laptop which I think has a Realtek RTL819 wireless lan controller. I've looked at the handbook and added if_urtw_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf and wlans_urtw0="wlan0" in rc.conf. But when I try and do ifconfig wlan0 up scan it says the device does not exist.

Again I'm very new so tell me if you need any more details to be able to help! Is this card supported in freebsd FreeBSD 9 with that urtw driver? Also, my home network uses
MAC filtering if that makes any difference, but the router already has my MAC address on its ok list.

I don't know if I should add that when I boot up I have to choose option 4 to disable the ACPI before I boot because ACPI never works enabled and gives me an error - not sure if that has anything to do with the wireless or not.


Thanks in advance.
bbzz
April 16th, 2012, 18:42
Hi all,

I'm a complete beginner in FreeBSD systems and I'm having trouble getting my wireless to work. I am using FreeBSD 9.0 on a Toshiba l505 Satellite laptop which I think has a Realtek RTL819 wireless lan controller. I've looked at the handbook and added if_urtw_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf and wlans_urtw0="wlan0" in rc.conf. But when I try and do ifconfig wlan0 up scan it says the device does not exist.


kldstat
lists loaded modules. See if the one you have is there.

Try manually creating wlan0 rather first, see what messages you get, if any.
ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev urtw0 up

... my home network uses
MAC filtering if that makes any difference, but the router already has my MAC address on its ok list.


Why, what does this do?
JonathanBSD
April 16th, 2012, 19:02
Tthanks for the quick reply.

kldstat lists:

kernel
if_wi.ko
radeon.ko
drm.ko

and when I type

ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev urtw0 up

I get the error message

SIOCIFCREATE2: Device not configured

For your question as to why MAC filtering, because my modem doesn't have a WEP key so it was the only way to stop other people connecting to it.
bbzz
April 16th, 2012, 19:39
Well there you go, you don't have driver loaded.
Load with
kldload [driver]

But I think that already in kernel.

So, the next most obvious question is, what makes you think you need that specific driver?
Hit
ifconfig
JonathanBSD
April 16th, 2012, 19:57
I thought I needed urtw as the ath0 didn't work and I read somewhere that realtek needs this driver.

When I try and kldload urtw it says

can't load urtw: file exists

Output from ifconfig is:

# ifconfig
re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=389b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM, WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC>
ether 00:26:6c:3d:b1:1b
inet6 fe80::226:6cff:fe3d:b11b%re0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
inet 10.0.0.11 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
status: active
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING
options=3<RXCSUM,TXCSUM>
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x8
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
bbzz
April 16th, 2012, 19:59
I don't see a wireless device there. re0 is Realtek wired.
What does this say
pciconf -lv
JonathanBSD
April 16th, 2012, 20:09
That shows this wireless card:

none1@pci0:2:0:0: class=0x028000 card=0x818210ec chip=0x817210ec rev=0x10 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
device = 'RTL8191SEvB Wireless LAN Controller'
class = network
re0@pci0:3:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0xff1e1179 chip=0x813610ec rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
device = 'RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller'
class = network
subclass = ethernet
wblock@
April 16th, 2012, 20:19
urtw does not support the RTL8191. ndisgen is the only other option at present.
JonathanBSD
April 16th, 2012, 20:31
Oh I see, I'll try and find some tutorials on that then.

One other thing, I cannot change the brightness of my laptop screen using the usual FN method, but I saw on other's posts people can change it by loading acpi_video then using a sysctl command to set the brightness level, would you happen to know what the command is?
JonathanBSD
April 17th, 2012, 18:51
well I found this tutorial on using ndisgen to get my wireless card working:

http://faqs.pcbsd.org/index.php?action=artikel&cat=4&id=324&artlang=en


but I can't for the life of me find a website where I can download the windows drivers for it. Everywhere I look it's just Windows based installers. Do you have any ideas how to obtain the drivers to wrap in ndis?
JonathanBSD
April 17th, 2012, 20:26
Well, I think I found the drivers, and made a .ko from them, I have been following this tutorial:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config-network-setup.html

Everything loads great, however dmesg doesn't show any ndis0 device, and ifconfig confirms that the device doesn't exist. - does this mean that the drivers I downloaded are incorrect?
wblock@
April 18th, 2012, 07:08
Possibly. If you're running amd64, the 64-bit Windows XP driver is needed.
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