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…

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.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…
• bringing the past to the future….