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.
*****update March 12th*****
So, I went ahead and added the lines to /boot/loader.conf to automate the loading of the driver during startup, but I have also been getting the same results with all driver versions. (XP drivers fail to convert, and Vista and 7 drivers convert fine, but the system still refuses to acknowledge the existence of the hardware device after using kldload or even restarting.) I currently have a KUbuntu live CD loaded and an lspci from a terminal screen shows the network controller, states it is a realtek and gives a device of 8190. however, the control panel does not acknowledge a wireless adapter as being present nor does ifconfig show the wireless adapter as being present.
I tried installing ndiswrapper from the cd and attempted to load the windows drivers from there. First I tried running ndiswrapper and it told me it was not installed and to run ndiswrapper-common, when I installed it and tried to run it it told me to install a bunch of other things. All were available except ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 which replied back that it was missing, obsolete, or no longer available, then that it had been replaced by ndiswrapper-common. so I could not run ndiswrapper because I did not have ndiswrapper-utils and could not install it because it was replaced by what I already had? got me, without doing an actual install, the good news is that it completely recognized it, I’ll have to check with an installation if it is already in the newest linux kernel, I have just moved on to Fedora since I do not intend on doind an Ubuntu install if I do not have to.
I booted up the Fedora 12 disc I have and it failed to bring up the KDE GUI. The Vterms were available, and an lspci -v showed the full information on the wireless card, so I am going to try a reboot and see what happens.
Everything came up fine with a reboot, not sure what happend the first time. it is not working; however an lspci -v shows no kernel driver in use. I will need to do some research to find out how to add the driver while running off the Live CD, probably get to that later. been working all day in front of a computer, need to relax my eyes some now.
*************Update 3-17-2010**************
just found this website and I think this is a linux driver for the rtl8190p 802.11n chipset
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/staging/rtl8192e/r8190_rtl8256.c
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… :)
not too much content this time (unless I get carried away again). couple of neat articles I read today (not the most trusted sources for news, but you have to make your own decisions… (both the things I started this post to talk about came from blogs.zdnet.com ) (another note, all links on my site “SHOULD” open in new windows, for some reason they never implemented “open link in a new tab” feature to HTML, or I just haven’t found it yet)
VirtualBox 3.1 - has been released with it’s new “big” feature… “teleport”. some people might recognize this as being extremely similar to IBM’s Power System’s Live Partition Mobility. in a nutshell this means:
Partition mobility provides the ability to move a logical partition from one system to another. Live (or active) partition mobility allows you to move a running logical partition, including its operating system and applications, from one system to another. The applications do not need to be shut down. Inactive partition mobility allows you to move a powered off (or deactivated) logical partition from one system to another.
Live Partition Mobility
Live partition mobility allows you to migrate running AIX and Linux partitions and their hosted applications from one physical server to another without disrupting the infrastructured services. The migration operation, which takes just a few seconds, maintains complete transactional integrity. The migration transfers the entire system environment, including processor state, memory, attached virtual devices, and connected users.
(actually quoted from the IBM training manual for IBM course AU78 “System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations” a training class I took in July of this year) and so it goes on… (I guess I just killed the “no long post” part at the beginning…) This has to be the coolest thing I have ever seen/witnessed/done in my life. I setup an LPAR (logical partition) on a System p server, installed AIX 6.1 on it, then while another person in the training class was logged in and doing something in the server, I migrated it to another physical machine in less than 15 minutes with less than 5 seconds of down time (monitored with a CPU and HDD activity monitors running on the virtual server and a custom script that basically played the worm game and changed colors when the host system changed so we knew when it had actually made the switch)
Words cannot describe watching a multi-gigabyte installation of a server migrate to another physical box and keep working with less than 5 seconds of down time over the course of 12-15 minutes. I am guilty of not having checked the total used size of the data drive, so I do not know how large the transfer was). now to have this option in a freeware app that I can run on my Quad-core at home is very cool. Especially since VirtualBox is currently my VM-app of choice. Don’t get me wrong, I do/have used Virtual PC from Microsoft quite a good bit, but the configuration options and multiple VHD file format compatibility make VirtualBox the winner in that contest hands down. Also, I have nothing against VMWare personally; however it is intensely confusing to go from Virtual PC to a VMWare workstation application and figure out what is going on and how to set it up without going back to “what already works… and is simple to use.” Press release for VirtualBox 3.1
ok, after over 550 words, lets move on to the second half of my post (definitely not going to be a quick post… but then I always have a lot to say about stuff…)
OS and Web Browser share reports… Windows XP and Vista and MAC OS X are down, Win7 and Linux are up. Firefox and IE8 usage are up, IE6 and IE7 are down, and everybody else, well no comment was made… original article is here on ZDNet - FYI how/where this info came from is sited on the ZDNet page.
right few comments about the above, first interesting how Firefox #’s are combined for all versions, does that mean Mozilla does a better job getting people to upgrade? or that Firefox users are less likely to fall very far behind on versions? same thing goes for the Safari #’s. yes Safari and Chrome are mentioned in the #’s, but no comments were made as to their rise or fall.
(completely unrelated, but I am listening to Pandora right now on my Sprint HTC Touch and they just played “Coloured Rain” by Slade, whom I have never heard before, at least not knowingly. They are a British Rock band from the 70′s and I could have sworn it was The Beatles when it started playing…) (a note on that note, I Bing’d “wikipedia the beatles” and on the first page I got the Wikipedia page on the Beatles in the following languages, but not English… in order: sco, simple, nl, fr, ro, it. I know what all of those are, except ro (Russian? it doesn’t look Russian)… there were other results, including 2 Beatles albums’ pages on Wikipedia in English…)
After this post I should catch up to the here and now pretty quick…
right, so I had (finally) Ubuntu running with all the hardware working, and started messing with wine and trying to get World of Warcraft and DDO to run. no good that was. both were requiring the newest video drivers from AMD (I think that was what was wrong, never quite figured it out…) the games would both load but would fail at some point, and have other issues… including not allowing me to login or play… 
Well the video driver issue ended up being that (yes it did install fine) the on-board video on the laptop had just (and I do mean within a couple of weeks/a month or two) been taken out of the newest updates, and had been placed in the “legacy drivers” list. mean while, before I actually figured this out, was installing dot net (nearly every version) into wine, and flash, and java, and all kinds of stuff. I Was getting really excited, the laptop was working great, even if not with the OS I really wanted. especially since I could not find this model on the inet anywhere as being functional in linux. (the wireless and audio is what normally fails to function, and I had both working in more than one flavor of linux)
then one day at work a co-worker was looking into selling an old IBM T40 laptop and we were shocked to see people paying $150 or more for them. so I decided what the heck… I put my laptop on Craig’s list one after noon about 3pm. I had 4 emails and 3 phone calls before 8pm that night. decided to sell it to the first caller, they wanted win XP, so I wiped it (oh well, good learning experience) and set it up for them, then they had to postpone coming to get it, because of a dinner party they had forgotten about, then they were not sure if they could get it, and told me to not hold it for them anymore. well I did not get it sold, and now had win XP barebonez’d on it and login ID’s setup for people who would never see it, let alone use it.
oh well, not sure if I mentioned this or not, but I started having some wierd HDD errors on my semi-new desktop PC. failed writes, ticking noises while the drives were spinning, drives disappearing, then coming back after rebooting… it looks like I may have 2 or 3 bad HDDs. I get all the data moved off the Seagate that was reporting bad sectors and I get an RMA setup, quick and painless… now I just need to find a box, or “original shipping packaging” anyone who has not had this on hand and has had to look for it will know. it’s not real easy to find a custom fitted HDD packaging that perfectly fits the box you plan on sticking it in, and has a minimum of 2″ of foam on all sides. So I decided to ask around at work… I also submitted a tech help request with ECS, the manufacturer of my motherboard, as I was having both video problems AND HDD issues at this point.
on to the next issue that was going on…
so I had to go to Pittsburgh for training for work, 1 week, 2 semi-high level virtual server training courses taught by an IBM instructor (AU72 AU78 and AU73 the AIX Virtual I/O Server training. I’ll check at work tomorrow and will update if wrong on those –updated). had an awesome time in Pittsburgh, got to meet the team I was working with virtually, and learned a tonne of stuff. (I prefer the metric tonne to the American ton, so much more useful, and a conversation piece when used in writing… 
pictures are available on picasaweb there are not a whole lot of images (50 something), I was working (and no I did not take any images of where I was working, but there is a hint about for whom I do work. sorry folks I might slip somewhere, but company policy severely “suggests” that I do not disclose anything about my employment that is not necessary…) most of the time (working that is, I got distracted and used one of my parenthetical explanations that I am overly fond of and are truly not necessary, nor wanted by most. HOWEVER, and this is the good part, I am writing this, not you, and you are not paying me to do so!! SO!! I will use excessively long descriptions/mental overture if you will, at my discretion. I sure hope WordPress has a good spell checker, cuz I make up words all the time) umm… now where was I?
oh yeah, I was working most of the time, and so only took a few pictures, now that I no longer have a semi-pro DSLR (Canon 20D) I am stuck taking pic’s with a semi-crummy Kodak 6mp point-and-shoot. Back to the point.. The weekend I got back from Pittsburgh, and I had to move, across the hall from a nice 1150-ish sq ft 2 BR apt to a kinda cramped 950-ish sq ft 1 BR apt. Things got switched around, and now my Sheeva Plug fails 80% of the system checkpoints during bootup (not that I blame the move, just that I had no problems with it before this). it still functions (ie. turns on and I can log in via the console), except the network port interface is kaput… (defined as “ka·put also ka·putt (kä-p t, -p t, k-) adj. Informal. Incapacitated or destroyed.” at www.thefreedictionary.com/kaput ) (fyi I still have not gotten around to reflashing the ROM on it, which I learned back in early june, is necessary to allow the usage of SD Media Cards.)
HA! not sure what I talked about in this one, was a little distracted (doing some things on my desktop in preparation to RMA the MB…) but I’ll go ahead and post it as I hit 1k words.
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