# 8-RELEASE on Toshiba Satellite L500



## pacija (Dec 9, 2009)

Hi board members,

once again i need a bit of help. I just bought Toshiba Satellite L500-1EU, and installed it with 8-RELEASE. I got gnome just fine, but when i wanted to set up my net connection ifconfig didn't show my wireless card. I took a look at the dmesg, it is not there. pciconf also does not list it.

Then i thought maybe i just need to turn it on by pressing combination keys (fn+F8) to get it working but that didn't help. Actually, none of other fn keys worked (screen brightness on F6 and F7 etc.) Some googling suggested that acpi_toshiba_load in loader.conf will solve the fn keys problem, but after reboot i didn't get any hw.acpi.toshiba sysctls.

I would appretiate any help with getting my wifi card working. Is it possible that i just bought very bad laptop model, or broken laptop? Thanx in advance...


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## pacija (Dec 10, 2009)

some additional information:

i reinstalled this laptop (exact model is Toshiba Satellite L500-1EU) with windoze 7 in order to test hardware, and wifi works there. card is recognized as Realtek RTL8187B. Of course, it is not acceptable for me to keep windoze on it.

strange thing (for me) is that freebsd does not even list it in pciconf.

hope this information will mean something to someone...


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## bschmidt (Dec 11, 2009)

anyhow, can you post a complete `# pciconf -lv`?


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## bschmidt (Dec 11, 2009)

Argh.. scratch that, of course is doesn't show up, it's an USB device not a PCI device.

Seems like you're out of luck with that one, no drivers available afaik.


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## pacija (Dec 15, 2009)

Thanx bschmidt... in the meantime i gave up 

A short story would be: I recommended this laptop to my father attracted by its low price. He uses computer just to read mail in browser and to write documents in OpenOffice Writer. So i installed him windoze where wifi works and put this model on my blacklist.


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## elimite (Sep 7, 2010)

I have a satellite l455 with the rtl8187B card. had some trouble in V8, but seems to work in 8.1.

As a lowest common denominator test, try this. If you can do it without starting X - right from a terminal - so much the better.

Here's what I did:

In your loader.conf

```
if_urtw_load="YES"
```

and from a shell:

```
ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev urtw0
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig wlan0 ssid <sid> wepmode on wepkey <wepkey> weptxkey 1 authmode shared
dhclient wlan0
ping www.google.com
```

If google pings, you should have a working network.

please note: this example works for my home network. WEP encryption with shared keys. My failure to get this working in V 8.0 may have been due to including the 'authmode shared' option in ifconfig, so you might as well try before upgrading to  8.1.

good luck


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