# Wireless PCIe Card Support (specifically Realtek 8188ce)



## skyeyemachine (Mar 31, 2012)

Hello all,

I am in the process of building my first install of FreeBSD for general use (home PC and mild server/backup usage), and am slowly figuring things out.  However, I seem to have run into a significant stumbling block; my current wireless card in my machine is a Realtek 8818ce, for which (some prior research has pretty much confirmed) there seems to be no active driver support.  Currently I do not have a means other than wireless to connect the machine in question to the internet.

I have two questions;

- First, does anyone know what the state of the current driver support/progress is?  Can I expect a working driver any time soon?  (I am aware of NDIS for wrapping windows drivers, but short of trying it myself (not yet), I have seen a few reports saying that for this card-and-driver NDIS does not work.)

- Second, where can I find a list of supported wireless PCIe cards?  I have done some searching, and I am sure I'm missing something obvious, but thus far I have not found anything approaching a detailed list of supported hardware.  Also, if anyone can recommend a high-performance wireless N pcie card that FreeBSD supports, I would be interested to know, in case driver support for my current card is not forthcoming.

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A side note; in my first install attempts, I kept running into errors when the system tried to decompress the disk image after inputting all my settings.  This was using the PC-BSD installer image (with the FreeBSD option set), so maybe it doesn't directly apply to FreeBSD: however, despite my system having 4GB of RAM, and setting generous (>10GB) partitions for '/' and '/usr' (I think I read somewhere that the image is decompressed into your /usr directory on setup, is this right?), my system would constantly fall short of success somewhere in the 97%-99% margin.  Eventually, one attempt did go through, and the system seems to have installed fine after that.  I strongly suspect the failures were to do with space limits, because after several (like 5) install attempts, it did finally work (a little less data in the cache that time??).  Have other users experienced similar problems?  Do I just not have quite enough RAM (which seems surprising?)?

Also worth noting, I was originally trying to use ZFS as my filesystem type for my system and home partitions, and my final attempt used UFS.  However, I also had attempts using all-UFS that also failed in the same way.  I used encryption on all my partitions shport of /boot in every attempt.  I am new enough to FreeBSD's workings that I am pretty clueless as to just what I was missing.  If anyone knows what may have been going on, I'd love to know that too.


Thanks for reading this far!  Also, I'll take no offence if people shower me with resource links, if that's the best answer to my question(s).  I did look around quite a bit prior to posting though.


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## qsecofr (Apr 6, 2012)

You can try searching man pages for devices like rl(4) or re(4) etc.  to see which covers your chipset. Reading through the GENERIC kernel config file /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC will give additional device names, though I don't know how many others may pertain to Realtek.


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## shepper (Apr 6, 2012)

There is a wrapper script although it is out of fashion.  Another option is to check the hardware lists for supported wireless chipsets and go to a site like Newegg in a second brower tab.  Put the wireless card name/number in your search engine (third tab) along with 'chipset' or 'linux'. The refurbished section can usually net you a card with a natively supported driver for around $15-20 USD. Are you limited to a PCIe slot?  There are a plethora of cards for legacy PCI slots and I know the OpenBSD athn driver is available in a PCIe card.  Can't find if the driver has made it's way to F*ree*BSD though.


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