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…

Well my first choice of Ubuntu’s JeOS is probably a lot more work than I want to go through, so I am preparing my backup plan.  Going to my favorite OS of choice, FreeBSD.  while looking up VMWare and linux hosts I came across a link that referenced FreeBSD, so I did a little more searching and now I want to list those links so I can find them later and hopefully get that to work when I get frustrated with JeOS (since I am not intending on using it as it’s creators intended, I am expecting it to fail, but want to try anyways as VMWare supports Ubuntu based OS as a Host OS and JeOS is a watered down Ubuntu Server, and overhead is a primary concern when dealing with Virtual Machines.  Maybe if I document well enough and it does work, my notes will get added to the VMWare and Ubuntu knowledgebases).

Anyways, FreeBSD links involving VMWare and/or just VMs

1. Although dated December 2004 for the first post, this VMWare forum post includes responses from VMWare employees regarding not supporting FreeBSD as a Host OS.  Also includes links to a site where a non-employee had been providing a FreeBSD port for VMWare, but stopped maintaining it after VMWare Workstation 3.5 last post in the thread was dated Jan 16th 2010, and still no official support. (fyi I am looking into this, as I just got assigned to a VMWare support team and so I am trying to get more familiar with their products.  I would like to run VMWare on the most secure, least overhead Host OS possible, and I am already somewhat familiar with FreeBSD)
2. instructions for enabling VMWare tools in *BSD guests
3. instructions on installing VMWare tools in FreeBSD 8.x guest
4. fantastic instructions on setting up FreeBSD 8 with KDE graphical environment, clear step by step install and post install instructions.  I will try them instead of doing Ubuntu’s JeOS as having this running even without VMWare would make me most happy.
5. the FreeBSD Handbook page for third party applications for installing, upgrading, and building from source
6. the FreeBSD Hanbook’s page on setting up VirtualBox in BSD
7. the FreeBSD official wiki-site for setting up VirtualBox

More from Finndo

• another no longer short post on Linux and VMWare
• Fedora 12, VirtualBox, and Shared folders – a How To
• just a quick post about the blog…

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…