another step toward a working driver for Dell 1450 wireless card

[Scott Bennett]

     On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 12:56:23 +0400 (AMT) Hrant Dadivanyan
<ran at styx.aic.net> wrote:

>>      SUCCESS AT LAST!!!  Read on...
>> 
>
>Glad to hear, congratulations !
>
> [deleted]
>> >Please note, you need to feed bcm43xx.cat to ndisgen as well.
>> 
>
>This is wrong, because driver works without. That was my mistake, ndis
>wasn't load by some other cause.

     Okay.  I've now tried it without, too, and it seems to be okay.
>
>>   [stuff deleted  --SB]
>> >
>> >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.
>
>I confirm that patch works. Apply it and you can load "fresh" drivers
>from Dell. Thanks to Scot W. Hetzel for excellent work !

     I applied the patch, which seems to work well with the old driver.
I also tried it with the new driver.  The four "No match" messages no longer
appear, but I still get a kernel panic at the same point during the kernel
initialization process (i.e., right after the card is identified), so I've
reverted to the old driver.
     There is also a problem with either the old driver or ifconfig, though
it has very minor impact for me.  "ifconfig ndis0 mode 11b" is accepted,
but specifying 11a or 11g gets error messages.  In any case, it seems to
accept 802.11g-speed connections.  I don't think I've ever run into a router
using the 5 GHz band, so I can live with this for now.
     Thank you very much again!
     Now, on to obstacles in the ports tree...


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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