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Old 6th April 2009
guitarscn guitarscn is offline
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Default Are these USB wireless adapters supported in OpenBSD?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833166022
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833166041
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833166037
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833166025
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833124278
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833124328

I have no idea how to find out what chipset they are or if OpenBSD supports them. Looking in the OpenBSD Supported Hardware page, I can't tell which products belong to which.

Last edited by guitarscn; 6th April 2009 at 12:58 AM.
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Old 6th April 2009
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by guitarscn View Post
I have no idea how to find out what chipset they are or if OpenBSD supports them.
These are two questions, so I will answer them independently:
  • I spent a moment looking at both Newegg's & Rosewill's Webpages searching for the base wireless chipsets, & did not find them, so you may need to spend time doing various Google searches to find out this information.
  • To find out what wireless chipsets are supported by OpenBSD, issue the following command:

    $ apropos wireless

    ...& sift through the list for wireless drivers. On the individual manpages, it is quite common for a list of supported products to be found. As an example, look at ath(4). There, a list of (known) compatible products & their form factors (PCI, CardBus, mini-PCI, etc.) are given. Many of the other driver manpages provide similar information.
So to answer your own question(s), you will need to spend time spelunking on the Web. Tedious? Perhaps, but with patience you may very well find your answers.
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Old 6th April 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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There is another way to approach this, since there are so many different 802.11 drivers.

The developers seem to classify the vendors in three general categories, based on hardware docs and general openness for discussion. These are my rough categorizations:
  1. The best vendors have open documentation, and they'll even work with developers to solve issues when behavior doesn't match the docs.
  2. These vendors have limited documentation, which usually seems to go hand-in-hand with limited communication.
  3. These vendors do not release open documentation, and usually are generally atithetical to open source projects. These vendors either provide a BLOB driver for Linux/FreeBSD, or they provide documentation under NDA, or they remain entirely closed.
There's a color coded list of wireless drivers, available from a presentation Theo gave at OpenCON in 2006:

See http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/opencon06-docs/index.html
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Old 6th April 2009
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
There's a color coded list of wireless drivers, available from a presentation Theo gave at OpenCON in 2006:

See http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/opencon06-docs/index.html
This is good information to start with, however, the OP should recognize that because this information was published in 2006, it is no longer definitive given the volatility of both the wireless market & OpenBSD's continued development. Sifting through the list of drivers obtained through apropos(1) may be laborious, but if done on the target system itself, will give information which is synchronized with whatever version is installed.
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Old 7th April 2009
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Yes, it is true that hardware is a moving target. Even so, hardware for a "green" driver, if such hardware is available, is more likely to operate favorably in a wide variety of conditions than the others, with the understanding that shifts in the marketplace may open some closed documentation, with eventual driver improvements. Such events are few and far between, and publicized in places like the OpenBSD Journal.

Last edited by jggimi; 7th April 2009 at 01:31 AM.
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