Sunday, October 25, 2009

Wifi on FreeBSD

Compared to adding sound support, adding wifi to FreeBSD was a little bit more difficult. Of course, man wlan helps. Once you know what your wireless chipset is called, you can man that (look it up in the manual). On this Latitude D600, it was iwi. It could have also been ipw. I found this documentation helpful: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-wireless.html (FreeBSD Handbook, Chapter 31 Advanced Networking). Part of the difficulty is that the wireless router (access point) I wanted to connect to uses WPA security. Another issue is that you need to agree to the Intel license agreement and load the firmware. You need to load the 802.11i security components and use the wpa_supplicant. These lines get added to /boot/loader.conf (again, there is a way to do it in the kernel configuration file, but I don't know the pros/cons of that):
legal.intel_iwi.license_ack=1
if_iwi_load="YES"
wlan_load="YES"
firmware_load="YES"
iwi_bss_load="YES"
iwi_ibss_load="YES"
iwi_monitor_load="YES"
wlan_scan_ap_load="YES"
wlan_scan_sta_load="YES"
wlan_wep_load="YES"
wlan_ccmp_load="YES"
wlan_tkip_load="YES"

In the file /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf I had to add:
network={
ssid="mySSID"
psk="myPSK"
}

I added this line to /etc/rc.conf:
ifconfig_iwi0="WPA DHCP"

When I reboot, I have internet access, and it connects to my network as part of the loader script. Once I figure it out, I need to detail how to load Firefox (not hard) with Adobe Flash support (seems hard).

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