April 6th, 2011

By finndo On April 7, 2011 · 1 Comment

Just a few quick update notes and then I’ll let you be on your way! I have finally received my Notion Ink Adam I do like it just as much as I thought I would, especially after replacing the stock rom! I have already put up 3 posts in [...]

Just a few quick update notes and then I’ll let you be on your way! I have finally received my Notion Ink Adam I do like it just as much as I thought I would, especially after replacing the stock rom! I have already put up 3 posts in regards to my Adam, so be sure to check them out. It appears that all of my hardware is fully functional and without defects, although I have not yet tried a video recording. Everything looks perfect! (except the screen protector, which I screwed up when I put on my Adam! Pics are up on the gallery post)

Also, I’ve been messing around with my home wifi settings and noticed some things (some of these I already knew, but I’m posting them, as I have not previously, or stated something different previously). I have a Cisco e3000 dual band 802.11n router with four 1GB Lan ports, and a USB port that I can attach a USB stick or USB harddrive to and access from the internet via ftp (very awesome and super cool!), I have a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer thumb drive attached right now, it supports user creation, passwords, and even security groups!

  1. apparently my Cisco e3000 Router powers cycles the 5GHz frequency prior to powering on the 2.4GHz frequency
  2. sometimes when resetting my router, I have to turn off wireless networking on my Android devices, then turn it back on or they won’t see the network
  3. It appears that the amount of time between restarting my wireless on the router and when it becomes available to devices is equal to the Beacon interval multiplied by the DTIM interval.
  4. My HTC Evo 4G does NOT support 5GHz 802.11n, only 2.4GHz (does not even see the 5GHz network I have), apparently the HTC Evo networking chip (bcm4329), not only comes in two models, one with dual band 2.4GHz & 5GHz and one without, is the same one in the Nexus1, Droid Incredible, GTab, iPhone 3GS & 4, iPod Touch, and iPad1 (who knows what else it is in!), and is a SoC with 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz, BT 2.1, and FM transceiver, I wonder if anyone has gotten the iPhone4 to do FM yet?
  5. My Google Chrome OS cr-48 netbook does do 802.11n 5GHz.
  6. My Notion Ink Adam does not do 5GHz, it only does 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n

    7. As I’ve said, I’ve been messing with some of my network settings (specifically on my router) and I have found that a DTIM Interval setting of 6 on my 5GHz 802.11n settings works with my cr-48 Chrome OS netbook, but upping it to 7 causes intermittent connection issues. Changing the DTIM interval to 5 on the 2.4GHz b/g/n network works with my HTC Evo and Lenovo ThinkPad T410, but not the Notion Ink Adam which fails to connect to the network at all. The HTC Evo has sporatic issues connecting and maintaining that connection when the DTIM is set to 7, hopefully there is a hack out there that will let me enable the 5GHz wifi n (if possible) on the Evo, so I can switch it over to the 5GHz network and take advantage of the increased DTIM setting. On a side note, some research I did while working on this, here is a great document on understanding wifi network traffic, latency, roaming/multiple APs, and bandwidth overhead (actually a document on optimizing wifi for VOIP). This Cisco router’s documentation has some good descriptions of the wireless settings.

    Ok, so I’ve learned a few things while I was typing this and made some more modifications, previously I was using a 20,000 millisecond beacon time with those DTIM settings that is why I was having connectivity issues, I have tried to figure out the maximum time between DTIM packets and maintain a steady signal between all of my devices (to decrease sleep mode battery drain when wifi is active) as part of my experiments to improve my Notion Ink Adam battery life (currently between 8 and 12 hours of normal+ use or 20-36 hours of minimal use).

    Below are the settings I’ve tried and the results I have received from each

    Beacon DTIM time result
    2000 6 12sec stable connection -4
    1500 7 10.5sec connection loop -5
    1500 10 15sec connection loop -5
    3000 10 30sec connection loop -5
    6000 10 1min mostly stable
    6100 10 1min 1sec connection loop -2
    6600 10 1min 6sec connection loop -3
    7000 10 1min 10sec connection loop -3
    9000 10 1min 30sec connection loop -1
    12000 10 2min connection loop -2
    24000 10 4min connection loop -1

    1 – Evo stays connected for about 3 minutes before looping, Adam fails to maintain connection during obtaining IP Address
    2 – Neither the Adam or the Evo can successfully make a connection
    3 – Evo stays connected (tested 10 mins) without dropping, Adam fails to maintain connection during obtaining IP Address
    4 – both my Evo and my Adam stay connected (tested 10 minutes) without dropping and I tested my Samsung moment with the same results
    5 – the Evo stays connected and the Adam sometimes connects, then drops and won’t reconnect
    *note – I have deleted many of the numbers I tested leaving only a few behind; however I left all of the entries marked with a “-1″ as it is note worthy to look into a pattern.
    **double note – I killed a 100% battery charge on my Notion Ink Adam in about 4 hours testing this…

    even set at 6000 and 10 I am still having connection issues with my Notion Ink Adam, it will connect, but only the “first time” after each power on. If it loses the signal for any reason it refuses to reconnect and continues the connection loop issue. So right now I am just going to leave things that way and see how it goes for a few days.

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Recent computer hardware changes and future plans

By finndo On February 8, 2011 · 1 Comment

right, so headed in a different direction with this post, I have made several updates/changes to my home computing setup since last I posted about it, and have decided it is time to do something about that. Currently I am setup and using the following:

PC components

right, so headed in a different direction with this post, I have made several updates/changes to my home computing setup since last I posted about it, and have decided it is time to do something about that. Currently I am setup and using the following:

PC components

external RAID enclosure

now not all of the HDD models are exact, I tried to pick the ones that were right, but I know I have one WD that ends in AACS, although that might be my 500GB PATA in my external WD case… The Radeon 4890 had a cooling fan failure so I replaced it with a 29.4 cfm case cooling fan that I epoxied onto the outer hard plastic cover (would not have fit inside anyway…) I think that ought to keep it cool… :)

ok, so all was purchased from Newegg.com except the video card, which I actually got on Craig’s list for $60 (he was asking $75 I believe) nice guy, also an HTC Evo owner and friended me on facebook, although that is the only time we have talked… Anyway, the Rosewill case and the 2TB HDD were holiday presents to myself in early Jan, the 1.5 TB I got last spring, the Radeon and 8GB RAM (upgraded from 4GB) I bought this past summer, most of the rest I got in may of 2009. Currently, the first list is what is in my case, the second list is all in the RAID enclosure (not running any for of RAID on the box, just using it so I do not have to keep the drives in the V9 for now). (getting used to these shortcuts on this cr-48 notebook, starting to enjoy using it more!)

Ok, so I am running Ubuntu 10.10 on the 250GB drive, with both mine and my wife’s home drives mounted from partitions on the RAID enclosure, my music folder is on the WD green 500GB drive, which is then bind mounted on to my wife’s music folder, so we share the same files (I’ve been working on setting up labels in Guayadeque (the music player I am using, more on that later) to separate out her music, so she doesn’t have to listen to mine on random play). The 500GB Black edition drive is my Windows 7 installation I Was using last year. Then ll my data is stored on the 2TB and 1.5TB drives, with the Virtual machines spread across the 1.5TB and the 2TB drives, I am looking into another 2TB drive to replace either the Win7 Drive or the other 500GB and to spread the VM’s a bit more as I am finding myself using at least 2 VMs that are on the same drive simultaneously. Although right now I am not having space issues, I am having CPU issues with frequent 100% 100% 100% 100% showing across all cores. The good news is AMD just dropped prices a little on their 6 core CPUs, hopefully that means they have a new family launching soon, I haven’t been keeping up with the news that much lately. If a new family is coming out this year (unless they are 8 core AMD CPU’s I’ll pick up a 6 core when the price goes down again (again my current MB supports 6 core phenoms, another selling point when I bought it), or I catch them on special on newegg. Right now the 1100 is $239, when it hits $199 I’ll snatch one up. That should give a nice boost to my VM’s, although at that point I might be running low on RAM and need to pick up another 8 or 16GB of DDR3 (thankfully my MB supports 32GB, although that was the deciding factor when I chose it).

Last on my upgrade list will be a 100GB BD burner so I can make an easily store-able backup of all my data (which by that time will be so outdated I could delete most of it…), by that time there should be 100GB Blue Ray discs, so it won’t take too many to do it. I’ll make two sets and mail one off to my parents on the other side of the country, any changes after that I could probably do an incremental on DVD’s…

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Sprint HTC Evo 4G review, part 4

By finndo On June 17, 2010 · 1 Comment

Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera… the camera takes acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a decent point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera.  I have not yet tested the 720p video but should be able to today, so I will [...]

Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
the camera takes acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a decent point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera.  I have not yet tested the 720p video but should be able to today, so I will update this post with tha tinfo before uploading it to my blog.  Right, here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between.  This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen.  again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus.  still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up.  So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first).  my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot.  one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry.  my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along.  maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels.  I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight.  I do not have this issue with my 4 year old kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. the digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x.  Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there are those two new sweet ass models from Olympus that have 30x optical zoom and 2x-5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android that might be capable of doing this.  But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, not night shot mode (although it does pretty good in loow light on auto!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. no option for taking panorama shots.
8. it does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. quality settings of high, fine, and normal
10. resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone.  so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. the effects are interesting, none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy)  they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display.  I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
14. there are manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them.  for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together.
15. there is a timeout of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, nor have I been able to sync any BlueTooth devices to it yet; however I have a handsfree car speakerphone with FM transmitter in the mail on its way to me, and a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming as well.  So, I will have some more information on this soon.  I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered a cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug, so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
Let’s talk about the Evo 4G camera…
While the camera does take some pretty acceptable pictures, as has been mentioned online, it will NOT replace even a $100 point and shoot, nor any quality of dedicated video camera. Here is my list of good and bad and somewhere in between things with the camera on the HTC Evo 4G:
1. The pictures are crisp, clear, and sharp, most of the time.
2. The pictures are almost always in focus and the camera can focus anywhere on the screen with just a touch from the user, else it auto focuses on the center most often (I believe if you are taking a full frame or closer shot of a person, it will focus on the face, as I have seen it detect faces, sometimes… the auto-focus is fairly quick, IF you let it focus before you hit the camera button (to take the picture), I have noticed it can focus in less than 2 seconds always, and less than 1 second most of the time, if you let it; however if you hit the shutter release button before the camera can focus it appears to go through a pre-programed focal distant test that follows the same pattern every time and basically starts at infinity and works it’s way closer, testing every setting in between.  This process might take 1.5-4 seconds depending on how far you are from the subject in the center of the screen.  again if you touch to focus before shooting, it is very quick to come into focus.  still on the matter of focusing, it appears that there is also a 3-4 second time out set on the focusing script, if it cannot focus in that amount of time, it just gives up.  So, if your subject is moving closer to, or farther away from you, or even back and forth, it might not be able to focus on it and will take a blurry picture (if you tell the camera to shoot the picture without picking a focal point or allowing it to come into focus first).  my recommendation in this situation (ie with kids running around) is to pick a spot on the ground, touch that part of the screen, forcing focus there, and take your shot.  one more comment on this part and I’ll move on… fast moving objects that are close to you are going to be blurry.  my dog was walking and his legs are blurry, not running, not reacting to something, just walking along.  maybe it was just a bad shot, I’ll keep trying of course…
2b. There is a setting in the camera for standard metering modes: center, average, and spot.
2c. Also white balance modes: auto, Incandescent, Fluorescent, Daylight, and Cloudy.
3. Apparently the lens maximum opening is a wee bit larger then the sensor, this normally happens in a fixed lens system when the quality of the lens is subpar and it suffers from image degredation on the outer edges of the glass, as such a manufacturer would make the sensor smaller so that most if not all of the degredation would not be seen in the final image.
4. There also appears to be an issue with white balance/auto-adjust levels.  I have an extremely white dog, when taking pictures of him with my Evo, he has this aura of pure white that creates a halo around his body, this appears to only happen when he is outside and in near direct sunlight.  I do not have this issue with my 4 year old Kodak 8.0mp point and shoot.
5. The digital zoom appears to be only 1.8x or maybe a full 2.0x.  Definitely not enough to make anyone even think of replacing their digital camera, not when there is that new sweet ass model from Olympus with 30x optical zoom and 5x digital!!
6. I have not been able to discover any way to manipulate the shutter speed or aperture in the default camera app, I will look later and see if someone else has made a camera app for Android (there is one I saw “advertised” on AppBrain, haven’t tried it yet) that might be capable of doing this.  But, you cannot use manual mode, there is no “active” mode for moving subjects, no night shot mode (although it does pretty good in low light on auto! see the fountain shot on part 2!), no landscape mode, no portrait mode, no modes at all to be frank! (please don’t call me frank, I really don’t like that name…)
7. No option for taking panorama shots.
8. It does support ISO settings of auto, or 100, 200, 400, 800, 1250
9. Quality settings are fairly standard: high, fine, and normal.
10. Available resolution settings of small 640×384, 1mp 1280×768, 3mp 2048×1216, 5mp 2592×1552, or 8mp 3264×1952
11. Widescreen 5:3 or normal 4:3 image ratio (most useful for video but not available when shooting video)
12. 2 or 10 seconds self-timer
13. There is the option to turn on or off geo-tagging; however it is always off unless you turn GPS on FIRST, then go into the camera settings and turn the geo-tagging on, as the geo-tagging reverts to “off” anytime the GPS is shut down on your phone.  so you must do this everytime, or leave GPS on always (not a good idea for your battery)
14. Special effects, which are interesting to play with: none, greyscale, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, and aqua (just turns everything smurfy)  they work in less than .5 seconds on the current display.  I will try later when I do some video tests to see if they effect the videos also.
15. Additional settings are available, including: manual brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings, but you will rarely need them.  for some really weird reason the brightness setting has it’s own menu tab, and the other three are all together on one.
16. The Evo does have a sleep timer of about 3 minutes where the camera will shut off and the phone will display a message telling yo uto touch the display to activate the camera, which is a nice feature, IF that actually saves you any battery life…
Some video settings include:
1. Switch camera front/rear.
2. The same white balance options of the camera.
3. The same brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings screens.
4. The same effect screens.
5. Resolutions: 720p (1280×720), WVGA (800×480), VGA (640×480), CIF (352×288), QVGA (320×240).
6. Encoding options: H.263 and MPEG4.
7. Defined recording length: 1MB, 2MB, 10 secs, 30 secs, 1 mins (yes mins), 3 mins, or unlimited.
8. Record with or without audio.
9. The same metering modes as the camera.
10. Review durations: no review, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, no limit (seconds is spelled out on this screen, but not on the recording length screen).
11. Flicker Adjustment: auto, 50 Hz, 60Hz.
12. Auto Focus: on/off
13. Face Detection: on/off
14. Shutter Sound: on/off
It seems as though they left the setting there from the camera and just made changes for the options that needed to be different.
That is about it for the camera at this time, I will be posting images here every now and then, most likely I will be dropping lower rez versions on the blog, but will link to full rez images so you can click to see the whole thing for detail.
I have not yet been able to output HDMI video, I did get to sync my Hands-Free Bluetooth car speakerphone with FM transmitter to it and I have been using that quite happily for 2 days now with only one issue, it appears that the BT speakerphone goes into sleep mode after 10 minutes if you don’t hit a button, as it did to me this morning while listening to music pushed out to my car speakers via the built-in FM transmitter, even though I did receive a 5 minute call in the middle of that 10 minutes.  I also have a stereo Bluetooth Headphones/Headset coming in the mail that I will let you know about too..  So, I will have some more information on this soon.  I will be ordering a new HDMI cable in another week and will post up how that goes then too, I actually ordered an HDMI cable before the phone launched, but apparently there is a special cable for the Evo, and the one I bought (a really nice HDMI 1.4 5 meter cable too) does not have the correct connector plug (and I cannot find any adapters…), so I will have to buy the special HTC Evo cable for $20 instead of the $4 cable I already bought…
10 seconds of the ending credits of a movie taken on my Evo in 720p – details: 3.97MB, 1280×720, 12 seconds, 9fps, 6.00000 Mbps, type:video/4gpp video MP4V-ES
a video out the front window of my vehicle while someone else was driving taken on my Evo in QVGA (the lowest quality setting) details: 0.97MB, 320×240, 9 seconds, 29fps, 800Kbps, type:video/3gpp video MP4V-ES
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Working on getting FreeBSD running…

By finndo On March 11, 2010 · 2 Comments

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 [...]

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 :oops:  ) 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

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