Dell D800 and wireless ethernet card

[Mike Hunter]

On Oct 13, "Stephen Montgomery-Smith" wrote:

> I just got myself a Dell D800 laptop.  Really it is woking rather well - 
> one of the hard parts was the video card, because the nvidia driver 
> would just cause the computer to completely freeze.  But googling "Linux 
> 1680x1050" gave me some appropriate ModeLine so that the nv driver now 
> works.

FYI I had this problem, but I was able to get around it by adding this to
my /boot/loader.conf:

machdep.disable_mtrrs="1"

I have found it necessary to use the binary nvidia driver to get my D800
to export to an external monitor.

> But I digress.  This laptop comes with a Dell WLAN 1350 wireless 
> ethernet card.  I was able to get a driver by using the Windows driver 
> with ndis, and this does indeed work.  (I did have to surpress -Werror 
> in compiling the kernel.)
> 
> My problem is how to control this ethernet card.  For example, the wi 
> dirver comes with wicontrol.  In particular, I did get the ethernet card 
> to connect to a wireless hub (indeed dhclient ndis0 succeeded 
> admirably).  But I couldn't figure out how to disconnect the ethernet 
> card without rebooting the computer.
> 
> Perhaps ndis is still in its early development, and I just need to wait 
> for a "ndiscontrol" function or such like to come along.  Or is there 
> some other way?

I vaguely remember not being able to do what I wanted with wicontrol also.
I tend to press FUNCTION-F2 to turn the card off to "disconnect" :)

Mike