what do I do when a new piece of hardware doesn't even show up in dmesg?

[Andrew Gould]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Steve Franks <stevefranks at ieee.org> wrote:

> The only stumbling block to ditching windows on my laptop is a network
> card.  I have a vanilla ath card that works fine under win32 and
> fedora, as well as a lucent-branded wi card.  Neither even appears in
> dmesg when I put it in pccard0/cbb0.  If I stick a compact flash card
> in an adapter, however, it looks to work (haven't tried mounting it).
> Anyway, how do I even start to debug this, since I have no output?  I
> notice one of the lights on the card flashes when I plug it in, but
> that could just be part of it's power-up process...
>
> Eventually, I plan to hack my bios to get a "unsupported network card"
> to run without locking up the bios boot process, but from what I've
> read, that's alot of work...
>
> Thanks,
> Steve
>

Have you checked the "Hardware Notes" for the version of FreeBSD that you're
running?  You can find links to the current versions' notes at:

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/

That might give you some indication of whether the item is supported and
whether there is a kernel module that you need to load.

Best of luck,

Andrew