Joel Perry Productions

Right so first off I have to say that it is all my fault I am not currently up and running 100% in FreeBSD 8.0, I agree before anyone else can say it… I’m an idiot.  I went out and bought (went out=I hit up newegg.com)  a wireless card so I can stop bridging my network connection off my laptop, and I just had to buy an 802.11n dual antena (very cool looking too…) wireless PCI card, one that has a BRAND NEWish CHIPSET that is not currently supported in Linux, or BSD.  So, I will gladly bend over and take what’s coming to me for that one… But, it was the same price as the 802.11g card and supports MIMO!! so I think I deserve some brownie points for that…

Well, here is a copy of what I have posted on the DesktopBSD forum (more on that later)

Ok, well I had a nice long post typed out here (twice now, but I copied most of it before I hit the stupid key this time) with lots of details and useless additives; however I hit the stupid “back” button that IBM thought would be a good idea to put on the key board of this laptop right next to the up arrow… and so it is gone.

this will have to be a quick version, minus some heavily laden with porn russian websites (oh! there was also one trying to sell an iphone x-ray vision app too!!!) I can find zero info on this chipset, I have a Encore Electronics ENLWI-NX2 802.11n PCI card, works in Win7 AFTER running their config/setup progy.  Shows up in pciconf with class, card, chip, rev, and hdr hex codes, and a vendor and class listing, but nothing else.  It shows up in windows as an RTL8190P, I was unsuccessful in finding it in FreeBSD 8.0 x64; but I may have forgotten to capitalize the “R” in Realtek when I grepped the “pciconf -lv” results. 

manufacturer product page: http://www.encore-usa.com/product_item.php?region=us&bid=2&pgid=81_2&pid=412

I followed the ndisgen instructions posted in this forum by sqlbsd, and all went well until I tried to load the RTL8190P_sys file, then the system hangs for 3-6 seconds and finally the PC just shut off.  So a bit more PC info… I tried running FreeBSD 8.0 x64 first, but did not even find the card listed in pciconf (or dmesg) when I grepped for Realtek (maybe I forgot to capitalize the “R”? but either way I didn’t see it, and although I got KDE setup and it booted to the login screen, I could not log in, the KB and mouse only worked on the console screens, so I came back to DesktopBSD).  So, I have a clean DesktopBSD 1.7 x64 install on my machine, only 1 network card and it is this wireless card.

I am going to try the 32bit drivers, the win 2k drivers, and then the vista drivers that shipped with the card.  I also have the setup file from the manufacturer’s website DL’d and will check that for a different version.  if anyone has any ideas I’d be happy to give them a go.  I may try an Ubuntu Live CD to check if it will recognize the card, also puppy linux tends to find wifi cards out of the box, so I may give that a shot and see if I can figure out which drivers they use.

I knew I should have just bought the 802.11g card… but I had to go with the 802.11n just cuz it was the same price… and had MIMO support…

****edit 10 minutes later****
I did notice that the Encore ENLWI-G is listed on the FreeBSD 7.2 Hardware list, so there is hope…

****update 8:12pm EST****
So, the newly downloaded drivers from the website were slightly more generic (RTL819xP drivers) but they are 7 months newer, so I tried them.  The Win64 failed to convert invalid syntax line 2355 or so, the the winxp2k drivers loaded fine, but failed to create the .ko file.  The vista x64 drivers converted with no errors and loaded without crashing the PC; however the system still does not recognize the wireless card. so I guess I move on to something else?

Right, well then… now you know… and we all know what happens after that… (right, if anyone can’t find those russian sites (I searched for “RTL8190 FreeBSD”) I’ll be happy to email you the links… j/k  ) so on to a little more explaining…

As stated in the post I failed to find the wireless card even listed in the installed hardware listing, I am 90% sure at this point I did not capitalize the “R” as that just makes no sense.  After which I just dumped the FreeBSD install and went to Desktop BSD, as I have installed DBSD 1.6 previously on this hardware and it had KDE working in under 50 mins with no manual configuring and I was unable to type on the login screen currently in FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE.  So I booted up of my newly minted Desktop BSD disc and away it went.  I learned that if you create more than one UFS partition during install that when you reboot you get a “Invalid Partition Table” message instead of your OS. easy fix, don’t make multiple partitions.  The OS is up and running at this very second, but without inet access.

So I am off to try an Ubuntu live CD, Fedora Live CD, and a Puppy and or Slax USB bootable File System.  In an attempt to find out if any non-windows OS can auto configure or even load the Windows drivers to get that wifi working (I believe I have a post around here somewhere about my HP laptop running Puppy and it finding th ewifi adapter and being able to locate networks, but not able to connect, and Ubuntu 8.x on that same laptop working perfectly with wifi, so we shall see what happens…)

*****quick update, before I even post it… HA! ****

after reading the reviews on the NewEgg site (specifically one from feb 28th), I decided to DL the RTL8192E drivers from the Realtek website, will give them a shot before the other OS’s.

More from Finndo

• just a quick post about the blog…
• FreeBSD and VMWare
• Somewhere in June 2009…

Getting ready to setup my PC as a VMWare Server, got a new WD Caviar Black 500GB 32MB cache Internal drive so I can dump all my files on it to clean off a pair of 250GB drives to run the VM’s on.  I learned a long time ago you want different HDD’s for each VM if they are to be active, as the slowest part of a computer these days are the HDD’s and the last thing you want is more than one OS trying to run off the same HDD. Would be nice if I could talk myself into the cost of a few SSDs.  Below are some links I am finding while I research that sound useful or interesting, not all are exactly pertaining to what I am trying to do, some may be helpful with things I am going to do after I get it setup, so I’ll be adding things to this post as I find them, to build up some information links for setting up my VMWare server.

1. a forum post where someone describes exactly what they install as their host linux machine to run the VMWare server on, unfortunately this is for CentOS, which is okay, just not my preferred Linux distro.  and unfortunately according to VMWare’s website, Ubuntu, CentOS, and RHEL are the only supported Linux Distro’s… I wonder while they do not support FreeBSD as well? oh well, we shall see how it goes.
2. a great article on setting up Ubuntu JeOS, although JeOS is designed for being set up as a virtual machine, I want to see if it can be used as the host OS for VMWare Server also, and will be the first Host OS I will try when my new drive arrives. (that should be interesting, I’ll try and keep good notes)
3. Using Kernel Mode Virtual Machine on any Linux Distro with kernel 2.6.20 or newer.  Also not what I was looking for, but a great alternative, this is a guide book giving step by step instructions for setting it up and installing your guest OS, including command line inputs for setup.
4. setting up an IPCop Virtual Machine to manage your internet traffic, of course now I need to go and figure out exactly what it does (I can guess, but like to know more details).  Still not exactly what I started looking for, but these are the things I have been finding while looking and are still useful.  Setting up IPCop like this is definitely something I would be interested in doing to simplify my network protection; although I have a Sheeva Plug computer that I purchased specifically to do this, and just never got around to setting it up. (Still have to get it flashed to a new version on it’s NAND rom so the SD cards can work, so I can put a decent sized storage card on their to do all I want to do with it.)

(must be a problem with IE8 that is preventing me from inserting the web links, I’ll update this post later from Google Chrome and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll try it from Fedora and see if it works then.  Until then, I am sorry but I will not be posting referrence links to everything I type.)

(well everything works fine from Google Chrome under Windows 7, as you can see from the improvements to this post.  Unless of course you are seeing it for the first time now…  :)

More from Finndo

• FreeBSD and VMWare
• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…

start off with some non-techie stuff first…

I head back to see my surgeon next Monday,  where he will tell me that in another week or two I should start putting some weight on my leg (toe touch, or partial weight bearing?) when at my PT.  I am also hoping he will tell me it is okay to get my incision wet, as it has been making it very difficult to take showers!

ok, on to the good stuff.

So, I am not at home and do not have my desktop machine available for use for the last week, I have been going through withdrawal…  but having to work on someone else’s machine, and my wife’s laptop (I think I mentioned before, I gave her mine, and sold her old one) has taught me one important lesson, why I prefer Linux.

My number one reason for preferring Linux over Windows is system maintenance.  What do I mean? well, I mean keeping everything up to date, this latest round of Adobe patching should make this make sense to everyone.  I don’t use Acrobat on my Linux machines for this reason.  However; back to the point, when I need to check for updates on my Linux machine I open Yakuake with a quick hit of F12 and type “sudo yum update” and it comes back and tells me every single thing installed on my system that has an update available, period, end of statement.  On windows, I have to launch 5-8 different apps, find their “check for updates” button/link and wait for the results (I have learned by doing this that OpenOffice.org does not notify you of a new version being released, only if there are updates for your version.  example, I have 3.1 installed, and 3.2 is now available.  clicking the check for updates menu option tells my “There are no available updates for this version” (maybe not word for word, but that is just about what it says).  I run windows update, Acrobat Update, Java update, Picasa update, Chrome update, Firefox update, and on and on… (yes I know there is an Adobe Updater, but I don’t know how to initiate it in Windows, and never cared enough to look it up, but now that I have mentioned it I sure I found instructions and have put a link to them here).

Simple and easy to manage, most distros even let you run their package manager and it has a button to click to check for updates for your system, making it easier and more time consuming all at once to do the same thing.  (Yakuake is always running and it takes me about 1.5 seconds to type that line into the terminal, it takes a lot longer to load the package manager from the application menu and then click the check for updates button, but you don’t have to type that way!)

The actual GUI interface for Windows an Linux and even MAC are so similar these days, that I don’t care which I am using as far as that is concerned.  I have come to the understanding that there will always be applications/games for an OS, other than the one I am using, that I want to use/play (take iPhone for example, they have the best Air Traffic Controller game I have played, and I’ve hunted those down and played quite a number of them, but I don’t own anything made by Apple, and probably won’t ever, unless the 2nd gen iPad totally rocks… but I will be getting an Android Tablet this year (possibly the Notion Ink Adam, or the HTC Google Chrome OS tablet), so I still probably won’t get an iPad).  My concern at this point, as I spend more and more time as a Unix Admin is maintenance.  The system I use at home needs to be practically maint free, as most Linux and Unix machines are, they will run for years without being touched by an admin, the best I know of are an AIX Server and a OpenVMS server, the AIX server has been running since 1991 and has never been patched, updated, reconfigured, or messed with in any way.  It is setup to contact a NIM server for logins, so no new users have ever been added to it, it has never crashed, never lost power, never been rebooted.  That to me is the greatest achievement of humankind (in technology anyways, and some of these companies need to take a look at the AIX OS and learn something from it!!!).  The other machine, the OpenVMS machine has been running since before 1994, but has not been patched, never been upgraded, never been rebooted, since 1994.  now I know next to nothing about OpenVMS, and have not personally logged into the machine itself, but a friend and co-worker of mine used to be the sole admin for the OpenVMS machines at that company and although that one is the only one like this, it is still running today without interference from humans.  I am sure some other machines are out there doing the same, but these are two that I know.  The longest Windows Server I have heard of running without rebooting or crashing was about 2.5 – 3 years, after which the hardware components in the server failed and the machine was replaced.  Some people have told me about Windows servers being up for 4 years and then being restarted by some new guy, but I have no validation of it and they could not give me a more exact time frame.

not sure if I made a compelling argument or not, but I need some medication and to go prop my leg up, so I am done here.  Also expecting UPS sooner or later for an over night supersave shipment… and it takes me 5 mins to get downstairs…  :)

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…
• The first post, one which may disapear forever…