another step toward a working driver for Dell 1450 wireless card

[Hrant Dadivanyan]

> >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.

Try to download ftp://styx.aic.net/pub/FreeBSD/incoming/bcmwl5.tgz then.

>      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?

As Doug Barton has already said it's self-extracting .zip file, you can
extract it with archivers/unzip .
Version.txt supplied with the driver mentions only the following:
Title      : Network:Dell _Wireless (US) WLAN Network Adapter Card, Wireless 1370 (b/g)WLAN MiniPCI Card, Wireless 1470 (a/b/g) Dual-Band WLAN miniPCI card Driver
But .inf file contains BCM1450M and BCM1450C devices, so it's worth to try.

Abovementioned bcmwl5.tgz contains only bcm43xx.cat bcmwl5.inf bcmwl5.sys
files and precompiled bcmwl5_sys.ko on 6.2-PRERELASE from December 13.
Please note, you need to feed bcm43xx.cat to ndisgen as well.

Yesterday I found the following -
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=106131
with patch to ndis. It may work for you, sorry I don't have time now to
try it for myself, on holidays maybe.

> >
> >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.)
> 

If my information isn't too outdated, you will need to upgrade Linux ndis
anyway, because there is no native driver and ndis supplied with systems is
old. Not sure though.

Good luck,
Hrant

> 
>                                   Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
> **********************************************************************
> * Internet:       bennett at cs.niu.edu                              *
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> 

-- 
Hrant Dadivanyan (aka Ran d'Adi)			ran(at)psg.com
/* "Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes." */	ran(at)styx.aic.net