I posted on the NYCBSD list, asking a little more about USB adapters, and one person was kind enough to post an eBay link to a possible working USB adapter. They believe it will work, but don't guarantee it. Here's the link in case
@cookiemonster wants to try it.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ralink-RT3070-802-11n-WiFi-USB-WIRELESS-N-card-adapter-/261117253939
It's only $10.00 but will take about ten days to get.
I also, in an "Eat your own dogfood," mood, tried running FreeBSD as a VirtualBox guest in a small Fedora installation on my Zenbook, as I'd suggested doing earlier. I gave it 3 GB of the host's 4 GB for RAM and two of the host's four processors. It ran at almost native speed, though I didn't run
make buildworld
or any other heavy duty work on it. To speed things up, as this was a test, I used PC-BSD's
pkgng() repositories, and installed most things with
pkg install <whatever>
. However, on a few things, such as
dwm(), I used the port for installation. (With
dwm() I wanted to use a custom
config.h and I don't know if one can do that with
pkg install
. If it can be done, I don't know how to do it.
For me, who is just waiting a few months for CURRENT, but wants a FreeBSD install on this Zenbook, that is sufficient. I won't be doing very much with this machine, so I can either use the VirtualBox guest if I want wireless, or the actual install if I'm going to be sitting by my desk where I have cables.
For what it is worth, a few other drivers that are already working in OpenBSD, such as urtwn, which supports several newer USB adapters, are also now in HEAD and should be in FreeBSD-10.
One does have to be careful. For example, one driver, which I've already forgotten, (possibly
run(4)) supports an Asus USB-N13 version A1. I saw that B&H in NYC had a used adapter on sale at a very low price and brought my laptop there. They were very nice and let me try it, but it turned out that it was version B1 and wouldn't work. (There's a thread about someone who bought one of these, not realizing that they should be aware of the version number, only to find that it didn't work at
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=32071 ) Many of the adapters supported with with the existing wireless drivers are somewhat old, and many are shown as no longer in stock at various manufacturers.
This post is probably too long, but hopefully, it helps someone.