This FreeBSD newsletter covers the foundations recent activities, such as the 2006 fund raise campaign, the network stack virtualization project, the FreeBSD/sun4v and FreeBSD/arm projects, Java for FreeBSD, BSD conferences and a new 10Gigabit network testbed.
FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter December
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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But too bad no one in the freebsd community can be bothered getting ipw3945abg support working – get it working, and I’ll donate some money.
Donate test hardware and maybe someone will.
The driver is already available on the OpenBSD CVS; why not port that then offer it to download for those of us with hardware, to test it?!
You might try http://www.bsd-geek.de/FreeBSD/wpi-freebsd.tgz
Note: You need a symlink to /usr/src
Sam Leffler is working on porting the driver to FreeBSD after Damien Bergamini stopped his work:
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-apr-2006-jun-2006.html
Quote: “Support for the latest Intel devices, the 3945 pci-express cards, is planned for later this summer.”
Please stop whining, shut up and help! This is a volunteer project, if people are unwilling to help until everything they might need/want is running 100% nothing will improve ever (no personal offense meant btw).
HTH, Daniel
Yes, thats very nice, and I actually CONTACTED Sam Leffler <[email protected]>. and he said that there was no plan to make it available for FreeBSD.
The wpi you provided above is a broken, barely working driver – no thank you, I want a full, complete driver that isn’t going to constantly drop out of signals.
You can try the “working” Linux hacks *g* (just a joke), but FreeBSD is about quality not “it justs works (for a while)”.
There are currently 3 individual projects underway to make this driver available on FreeBSD. The latest effort is a port of the NetBSD driver, and is available for testing on 6-STABLE and 7-CURRENT.
See the mailing list archives for the -hackers mailing list for this week to see the most recent attempt (which is working for a lot of people).
It’s not about test hardware, you can barely take a step without kicking one of the damn cards.
The problem is Intel won’t give out documentation for the thing.
This is the only reason my laptop is running Ubuntu instead of FreeBSD, as the rest of my machines are.
Edited 2006-12-27 10:04
If you haven’t noticed yet we’re in the midle of a release cycle and a wireless driver is not that important compared to the problems that are being addressed at the moment.
This is a bit hilarious. This thread is dominated by some wireless driver. Odd I must say.
Wouldn’t you expect someone who is interested in FreeBSD to try to buy HW which is actually supported instead of just buying HW and then complain it’s not supported?
Sure, HW support is always important, but the problem is not the BSD team, it’s HW companies, so support those offering good specs and preferably drivers.
Now to get a bit more on topic… It’s completely fantastic to see how FreeBSD progresses forward with new innovative designs and brilliant ideas. All the things FreeBSD has nested together throughout the years is a key piece to what makes the IT revolution go forward. How many hasn’t borrowed things from FreeBSD? OSX, Windows, Haiku and many many more.
I do hope that 2k7 brings fortune to your camp =)
That’s true, but it’s hard work in a world full of hype from Microsoft, Apple & Co.
Wouldn’t you expect someone who is interested in FreeBSD to try to buy HW which is actually supported instead of just buying HW and then complain it’s not supported?
Who said I deliberately went out and purchasing hardware that was not supported – the wireless piece of hardware is teh *only* part of my laptop not supported – given that OpenBSD supports the Intel 3945abg wireless network card (sans WPA support though), I expected that the WPI driver, which provides that support, to the ported to FreeBSD within a timely manner.
You also seem to have a great issues with reading and comprehending posts where I have actually pointed out:
1) The hardware is supported via a driver which is opensource.
2) The driver for the said hardware was written by the OpenBSD programmer(s) and is actaully available in their cvs – nothing stopping anyone at FreeBSD from porting it.
3) I pointed out that the wireless driver maintainer has said that he has absolutely no interest in porting/making available support for the Intel 3945abg chipset on FreeBSD.
The issue isn’t can’t because there isn’t the information there, but won’t because he just can’t be stuffed.
Edited 2006-12-27 17:53
Have you tried NDIS, to run the windows drivers?
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config-ne…
Freebsd is a project made and maintained by volunteers, given your general candor I’m not surprised the maintainer showed you no interest, frankly you’re rather rude.
*Kaiwai wonders how many of these people here get mugged because they make smart ass comments*
I contacted him, and requested a time frame when one could expect that the wpi to be ported to FreeBSD; I was expecting atleast 6.3 to get it – the fact is, he said it was not going to be ported at all.
Regarding NDIS; there is a known issue in regards to NDIS and the Intel drivers – this is the same issue which is faced by users on OpenSolaris as well – the failure to compile the driver as required.
Development of a wpi(4) driver is underway, there are currently three separate projects working on this. The latest one is by Benjamin Close and is a port of the NetBSD driver. It is available for testing on 6-STABLE and 7-CURRENT from here: http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/wpi_port/
Download it, install it, test it, and let Benjamin know how it works. Quite a few people have already done so with success. Others are having a few issues with it.
Work is underway.
Anyone knows why 6.2 has fallen so much behind schedule? I know it’s about quality, testing etc but I would like to know what’s holding it back.
One reason to care is that the next version of DesktopBSD won’t be released until after 6.2.
Last minute bugs found in the em(4) driver during the betas. A bunch of other show-stopper bugs found in RC1. The RAID array in the FTP master server dying at the last minute.
FreeBSD 6.2-RC2 is being compiled now and should hit the FTP mirrors this week. The new plan is to release 6.2 in the first week or two of January (unless some major regression is found in RC2).
See the long thread about this (started by Brett Glass) on the -stable mailing list.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.2R/todo.html
You can find some info here.
In the schedule it seems RC2 is on the way, so hopefully we’ll have a final soon.
Edited 2006-12-27 17:29
See comment in thread above this one.