Of FreeBSD and wireless networking.

M

mroberts23

Four years ago I first installed FreeBSD and was liking it in a lot of ways, but then my computer died. Now I finally have a newer computer with a Sandy Bridge CPU and 8 GB of RAM and would like to get geeky again. However, I gave up my huge cable bill in favor of a medium sized cell phone bill and now the only internet connection I have access to is via:

  • Tethering my Android phone to my PC.
  • Using my Android phone as a WiFi hotspot with an rtl8188su USB NIC.

I have found that the rtl8188su chipset is not supported in the default kernel because of its firmware and/or license. My phone's tethering app says it is compatible with Windows and Linux, but says nothing about *BSD or Mac OS. With only 5 GB of data a month I don't want to download the FreeBSD .iso file unless I am sure I can get networking going with just a standard install. Does anyone know a way to test my phone to see if tethering will work? Also, any links to additional reading materials about tethering and FreeBSD 9.1 would be very appreciated.

Thanks for reading all of this,

M
 
Hi!

Well, first of all, it would be nice to know which phone you're using.

To see if tethering is supported on your phone, you might want to ask the people on freebsd-usb@freebsd.org mailing list, where there were some people mentioning the tethering. They would be able to answer your questions better.

As for tethering for Android phones, you can see this short guide (although I would still recommend the Handbook than this for the desktop configuration), which also mentions it. Search for the word "tether" to find it. It's in the "Enable Networking" section.

This thread also seems exactly what you need. Also see this thread. I managed to get these links by searching for the keyword "tether" with the forum's "Search" option.

If you don't want to download FreeBSD, you may want to
  1. visit this website,
  2. go to the public library, and download it there,
  3. ask a friend to download it for you.
Heck, if you want, even I am willing to send you the DVD, if you send me a private message with your address, it's on me (yes, I know, you cannot even believe that such good people would still exist on this world anymore, but this is the FreeBSD community ;)), because believe it or not, I know how you feel. I didn't have home Internet connection until 5 years ago.
 
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