Determining WiFi Support before installing

dodogames

dodogames

Hi, i want to give FreeBSD a try as for a while it has been grabbing my attention lately and i wanted to see how different things are there.

One of the things that confused me is wireless networking as apparently some wireless cards are not supported and i don't know if i checked right. This is what i have on my laptop.
1762714617232.png
 
Hi,
looking towards the bwn(4) manpage (Broadcom wifi driver), it looks like BCM4313 isn't listed. IIRC, our old (now dead) laptop had that wifi card as well, had to replace it with an atheros one (my choice).

You can also test things out without installing since the iso already have live session mode and you can get a shell. For example these commands would help.

Code: 
$ sysctl net.wlan.devices
net.wlan.devices: ath0 (from my system)
$ ifconfig
 
There is support for Broadcom BCM43xx based PCI/CardBus by bwn(4), your device might have a problem with the device ID. Without the correct device ID the driver won't attach to the device.

I'm not familiar with "lspci". Does "Device 051a" represents the device or vendor ID? Run lspci -nn to get the vendor and device IDs.
 
T-Daemon said:
There is support for Broadcom BCM43xx based PCI/CardBus by bwn(4), your device might have a problem with the device ID. Without the correct device ID the driver won't attach to the device.

I'm not familiar with "lspci". Does "Device 051a" represents the device or vendor ID? Run lspci -nn to get the vendor and device IDs.
Click to expand...
Returns this
1762724035845.png
 
Best thing I can recommend is fire up FreeBSD memstick installer and go to LiveCD mode instead of installing.

Once there log in as root and have a look at the PCIe devices.

pciconf -lv |more

You are looking for the wireless device. It should be near bottom.

bwm0@pci0:58:0:0 might be an example. This would show the driver is attaching. Maybe need firmware loading as well.
none0@pci0:58:0:0 would show that no driver is attached and it will not work.
 
Phishfry said:
Best thing I can recommend is fire up FreeBSD memstick installer and go to LiveCD mode instead of installing.

Once there log in as root and have a look at the PCIe devices.

pciconf -lv |more

You are looking for the wireless device. It should be near bottom.

bwm0@pci0:58:0:0 might be an example. This would show the driver is attaching. Maybe need firmware loading as well.
none0@pci0:58:0:0 would show that no driver is attached and it will not work.
Click to expand...
Seems like it's a dead end as I found my card under "none2". Oh well.
 
i hacked bwn to add BCM43228 but it was more than just adding the pci ids
bwn0: WLAN (BCM43228 rev 30 sromrev 8) PHY (analog 9 type 4 rev 16) RADIO (manuf 0x17f ver 0x2057 rev 9)
the revision (30) and phy data also matters. some combos are not implemented
i pulled the data/code from the linux b43 driver for mine
it works but not great (usable though)
 
blackbird9 said:
A simple way to test the hardware would be to run ghostbsd live from a usb stick. You can boot off the stick and run from it without doing a full install, and then test whether your wifi card is working from the desktop. It's pretty useful. Of course you can also check which driver has been loaded while it's running.

A simple, elegant desktop BSD Operating System | GhostBSD

www.ghostbsd.org www.ghostbsd.org
Click to expand...
I actually tried that before i realized i needed more ram. I was like at 4 gb of ram on a low end system so it just failed to boot properly.
 
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