Project Evil: Success with Realtek 8180 (RTL8180)

[Eric Wenger]

I have a $20 Trendware TEW-228PI with a Realtek 8180 802.11b chipset on
board.  I have successfully installed the device driver from
www.realtek.com.tw (XP/version 166) using if_ndis.  To do this I upgraded my
5.2.1-STABLE to 5.0-CURRENT, which I understand isn't required, and then
built the driver following Bill Paul's directions.  I had never installed a
wireless driver under FreeBSD before so the only confusing item was that the
device would come up a few seconds after ifconfig inet x.x.x.x netmask
x.x.x.x ssid xxx.  I also should point out that you can't configure two
interfaces on the same subnet under FreeBSD so if you are hard wired to a
wireless router you need to take care with addressing.

Thanks for the great work on Project Evil!

Eric