another step toward a working driver for Dell 1450 wireless card

[Scott Bennett]

     SUCCESS AT LAST!!!  Read on...

     On Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:00:37 +0400 (AMT) Hrant Dadivanyan
<ran at styx.aic.net> wrote:
>> >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.

     It turned out to be okay.  I had just misremembered the file length.

>>      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 .

     Thanks to both of you.  The desired modules came out of it just fine.

>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.

     I hadn't been aware of the bcm43xx.cat firmware file, so I checked the
modern driver files for it, found it, and tried again.  It still caused the
same error messages and kernel panic.
     So then I tried the "old" driver you directed me toward.  When I then
did a kldload bcmwl5_sys.ko , lo and behold, no errors, the card was correctly
identified as a Dell 1450, and the kernel kept running as though nothing
important had happened.
     As I write this update, I am logged in remotely to the system I handle
email on from a Starbuck's via a free-access wireless router at a Panera
restaurant across the highway.  I've done a fresh cvsup on everything except
the ports tree and have run a "portsnap fetch update" as well.  The connection
seems to work just great!
>
>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.

     I'll check that out when I find a bit more spare time.
     Thank you ever so wonderfully much for your help!  This is great!  Now
I won't have to go bother my friends to let me hang out for hours at a time
in their basement with my computer hooked to their router by wire. :-) :-)


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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