# driver wireless Atheros AR5B97 problem on FreeBSD 8.2



## avant (May 28, 2011)

I use an Acer Aspire 4750 laptop with FreeBSD 8.2.  I've tried using the wireless driver from windows xp with "ndisgen" but did not succeed. I've circled in this forum but did not find any problem as I did on my laptop. Please help me solve a problem on my laptop wireless driver

Thank You


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## francis (May 29, 2011)

Hi, You do not write too much information about what exactly you did. First of all I think that you should look at *the FreeBSD hardware notes* to check whether the card which You are using is supported by FreeBSD? Secondly, you should read *Wireless Networking* chapter included in handbook. Similar topic was on the forum and it was not so long ago - May 11th; Atheros AR5B97 Wireless drivers for FreeBSD 8.2. It seems that Atheros AR5B97 is not yet supported, but *wblock* mentioned that "_There's hope, though_". *(-:*

You wrote that you have used *ndisgen*. Did you remember that you can not use a Windows-i386 driver with FreeBSD-amd64, also kernel sources are needed and the ndis.ko and if_ndis.ko modules must be loaded? I am asking you about it, because I noticed, that all kinds of HowTo's which describe how to use the Windows drivers, seems to forget about these issues. Generally these informations/advice are a little bit different from the information presented in the FreeBSD handbook. However, you can read chapter; *Setting Up Network Interface Cards* especially *11.8.1.1 Using WindowsÂ® NDIS Drivers*, and man pages for ndis(4) driver. Maybe you already have read that chapter? I do not know.

For the future. I think that net-mgmt/wifimgr - "_GUI-based tool to manage WiFi network configuration_" - may be usable for you in some way. Check out the official site; opal.com/freebsd/ports/net-mgmt/wifimgr/. Good luck!


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## adrian@ (May 30, 2011)

Hi!

I've committed the AR9287 support to -HEAD. It'll be there for 9.0-RELEASE.

No, I don't have any plans to backport the code to 8-STABLE; but I know that the code compiles and works on -8. You can just checkout sys/dev/ath, sys/modules/ath, sys/modules/ath_pci, build ath/ath_pci modules and enjoy the updated support.

I don't read these forums often, so if there are any other atheros related chipset support questions, please point out the relevant forum thread to me directly.

Thanks!


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