# Usb wlan



## Xardes (Aug 26, 2010)

hi all,

i am new in this forum. my german language ist bette as ma english :e -- i am a german pueple.

For a lot of time have i used freeBSD 6.4 experimetal. But, now i choose freeBSD 8.1 as homeServer.

a little problem i have - my old usb-wlan device has a linux driver only in source. 

the linux base is installed, howto i compile th esource now? 

excuse me, wot ist the right forum?

thank xardes


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## wblock@ (Aug 26, 2010)

Linux device drivers won't work on FreeBSD.  Use pciconf -lv to determine the exact device you have.  If there isn't a FreeBSD driver, see ndisgen(8).


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## SirDice (Aug 27, 2010)

What chipset does that wlan device have? If it's detected on linux, what driver? Same for windows, how's it detected?


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## lme@ (Aug 27, 2010)

As a side note:
The Linux compatibility layer is only for applications, not for drivers, you would need it to run the Linux version of Adobe Reader, for example.
If you don't find out what kind of chipset is used in your wireless stick, you can try the following as root after you removed the stick:


```
# exec sh
# cd /boot/kernel
# for driver in if_*.ko; do kldload ./$driver; done
```

You will get a lot of error messages that some drivers are already loaded, but you can ignore them.
Now type `# tail -f /var/log/messages`, hit enter a few times and insert your stick.
If you see something like "rum0" or "zyd0" you're almost finished and only need to configure your stick as described in the handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-wireless.html
If you only get a "ugen" device, you can try to convert the Windows driver to a FreeBSD driver, like explained here:
ndis(8)


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