another step toward a working driver for Dell 1450 wireless card

[Scott Bennett]

     On Sat Dec 16 17:23:31 2006 Hrant Dadivanyan <ran at styx.aic.net> wrote:

>Same here for Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card.
>AFAIK, some new functions (mentioned in the dmesg as no matches) are added
>in drivers that ndis wrapper doesn't understand. Linux people solve this by
>upgrading their ndisulator, I did it fetching older driver - R112196.EXE .
>Now it works fine and without an issue for two weeks already.

     Thank you so much for responding with this information!  It is the
first helpful reply I have gotten on the topic on any of the FreeBSD lists
in the nearly two years I have been frustrated by the Broadcom intransigent
silence problem.

>You can find it at http://ftp.dell.com/network/R112196.EXE or my copy at
>ftp://styx.aic.net/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/R112196.EXE .

     Okay.  I tried downloading it, but it's rather long, and I may have
been shorted a megabyte or so.  I'll try it again when I can.
     Meanwhile, is there any way to pry the BCMWL5.SYS and bcmwl5.inf files
out of the R112196.EXE binary without running it under Windows XP, which
would install it over the current driver?  Also, do you know whether that
particular driver version will support the 1450 card?
>
>There was also thread in archives about implementing the functions in ndis
>wrapper, but I found nothing about success.
>
     That's what I've found each time I've searched the archives, too. :-(
I want so desperately to stop using Windows XP, the worst operating system
bar none that I've ever encountered in my 40 years of computing.  But I
can't do it until I get wireless access working under FreeBSD.  I'd even
switch to LINUX if it gave me wireless access.  I tried installing Ubuntu
onto an external drive to see if it had a driver, but it didn't.  (I didn't
explore any NDISulator option under LINUX.)


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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