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Old 23rd December 2011
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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Default bcm43227 wl driver or broadcom-sta

Hello,
unfortunately I ran into the problem that NetBSD does not recognize my ethernet nor my wireless card.

Under Gentoo I use the tg3 (Tigon) driver from the kernel for my ethernet and broadcom-sta for my wireless card from portage to get these cards going.

The wireless one is a bcm43227. Broadcom offers the driver for cards depending on the wl driver as download. I'm not able to compile it on NetBSD because I have absolutely no clue what to do?

Anyone done this before? Or any hints?
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Old 24th December 2011
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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Just decided to buy another wireless card next week.
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Old 24th December 2011
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Linux has a larger community of, sometimes company sponsored, developers than the BSD's

On most BSD's you usually have a greater chance that your hardware is recognized by the kernel, when the hardware is not that bleeding edge anymore
I hope you find a good card.

If you would have been running OpenBSD I would have advised you to try OpenBSD current, the development branch.

The last official NetBSD release, 5.1, was released in Nov 2010. That is more than a year ago.
You still could try the latest NetBSD before you spent your hard earned cash on more hardware

See http://netbsd.org/releases/current.html for information about the NetBSD current development branch.
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Old 24th December 2011
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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Thanks for your advice. I have the latest NetBSD current packages and sources installed and I'm very determined to get it working..... but without a functional network ... ...it's no fun.

The driver for Linux, broadcom-sta is not very reliable. I experience a lot of annoying connection issues if the network is up. Sometimes everything works well for hours and then my card fails to connect every few minutes even though I believe I've done everything right regarding the kernel setttings and the firmware.

So I guess it won't be a too difficult decision to buy another card which will work. I decided to buy one from Intel.
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Old 26th December 2011
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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I think I'll go for a N-1000 (112bn) or an Advanced N-6205. I guess the N-1000 should work but I'm not sure about the N-6205. Has anyone used one of these cards or knows if they work?
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Old 30th December 2011
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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My wireless card arrived yesterday. It's a WIRELESS WIFI LINK 622AN --> also known as n6200.
Booting up my previously installed NetBSD didn't recognize the card. To get the card working without a network I had to do the following steps:
- download pksrc-current
-download src
- copy it to an usb
- copy pkgsrc and src to /usr
- unpack the files
- build toolchain
- compile kernel
Before doing that I copied my iwl-firmware from my Gentoo system to the libdata/firmware directory.

Because there seems to be a difference between Linux (iwl) and NetBSD (iwn) I copied the files to both directories/or had to delete the file iwl_iwl (this one is a file and not a directory as the other ones) and create the directory if_iwl and copy the firmware files there as well.

Booting up system with the new kernel immediately recognized the new card.

The idea I had is that if you have at least a little confidence that your card could be supported and that it is not recognized during the installation that you can at least do that firmware and kernel recompile thing before giving up.
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Old 30th December 2011
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tolstoi View Post
Because there seems to be a difference between Linux (iwl) and NetBSD (iwn) I copied the files to both directories/or had to delete the file iwl_iwl (this one is a file and not a directory as the other ones) and create the directory if_iwl and copy the firmware files there as well.
According to the iwn(4) manpage, firmware is looked for in /libdata/firmware/if_iwn. I suspect any remaining vestiges of Linux can be deleted.
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Old 30th December 2011
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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Good to know.
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Old 31st December 2011
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tolstoi, thanks that is very interesting.

Initially I thought maybe I could do something similar for my laptop's wireless hardware, but it looks like rtw(4) doesn't use firmware, so I assume it's not close enough to what I need.

Anyway, back on topic, one small question. What was the role of installing pkgsrc? I've never needed that to compile a kernel.
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Old 31st December 2011
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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Sorry, installing pkgsrc didn't have anything to do with it. Just src to be able to compile the kernel.
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Old 31st December 2011
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Ah ok, thanks for clarifying. I guess good to get pkgsrc at the same time if you're going to use it.
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Old 16th January 2012
tolstoi tolstoi is offline
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I went through those steps mentioned above again. It only works with the current branch.
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