[nycbug-talk] Searching for a "Plug and play" wireless network card

[Brian Callahan]

On 2/2/2013 12:28 PM, Jesse Callaway wrote:
>
> On Feb 2, 2013 12:12 PM, "Brian Callahan" <bcallah at devio.us
> <mailto:bcallah at devio.us>> wrote:
>  >
>  > On 2/2/2013 12:01 PM, Edward Capriolo wrote:
>  >>
>  >> I purchased a new Lenovo Yoga
>  >> http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-13/. SSD +
>  >> 18GB ram. I am playing around with different installs right now,
>  >> fedora, freebsd etc. The machine is pretty new so many of the
>  >> os/distros do not have all the driver information they need. I am
>  >> willing to "hang around" and wait for touch screen support.
>  >>
>  >> Right now the big blocker is it does not have a CAT5 and nothing is
>  >> picking up it's wireless card. Onto my question.
>  >>
>  >> Does anyone know of an off the shelve USB wireless card that "just
>  >> works" with modern OS's. It need not be fast. It could be a A or B
>  >> speed, I do not care. Just looking for something that
>  >> kickstart/jumpstart/graphical_installers auto-detects reliably without
>  >> driver disks etc.
>  >>
>  >> Thanks
>  >> _______________________________________________
>  >> talk mailing list
>  >> talk at lists.nycbug.org <mailto:talk at lists.nycbug.org>
>  >> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>  >>
>  >
>  > Anything based on RTL8187L/RTL8187B chipset (urtw on OpenBSD) should
> work OOTB on any BSD.
>  >
>  > eBay turns this up:
>  >
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/Alfa-500mW-USB-Adapter-Realtek-RTL8187L-AWUS036EW-5dBi-/380344755381
>  >
>  > HTH
>  >
>  > ~Brian
>  >
>  > _______________________________________________
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>  > http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
> Thanks to you and Glen for this. I find it frustrating to be arned with
> all of this informatiin, but still not being too sure of what's inside
> the plastic. Specifically, I mean you can do a couple hours of research
> and it's  then still a gamble because the mfgr will just up and change
> the chipset... then make sure the windows driver supports it.
>
> Yes, this is not news to any of you, but just venting.
>
> Unless a continuous effort is made, with lots of labor to maintain a
> database then we will always have to "hunt and gamble". The hunting
> comes with owning stuff, but the gamble is no fun.
>

I've found the Realtek stuff never changes the chipset on a product. A 
different chipset will have a different product name/number. Plus they 
tend to advertise the chipset openly and directly. Much different from 
some of the big-name vendors, indeed!

The manpages usually have a list of hardware known to work with each 
driver. Admittedly, it's sometimes non-exhaustive.

Of course, if you have something you know has a good chipset and it 
comes up unidentified, write up a patch or let a dev know 
(me/okan/others? for OpenBSD, I'm sure there are devs for other BSDs 
lurking here) so we can write up a patch.

I wonder if there's a way we can take the dmesgd entries, pull out the 
networking info, and keep that in its own separate database? Just a 
thought :)

~Brian