Setting up NDIS Wireless Networking in PC-BSD/FreeBSD
So you’ve got your spanking new PC-BSD (or FreeBSD) installation on your laptop, but now you need to setup wireless internet…. This can be a real pain in the a$$ so I wrote this guide to show how I setup wireless networking using NDIS.
NDIS allows windows wireless drivers to be converted and used in UNIX based os’s. This is very useful as there are quite a few wireless cards which aren’t supported directly by FreeBSD.
I’ve seen plenty of people struggling with NDIS in the PCBSD forum, so I thought I’d share how I got NDIS working in case its any use to anyone.
1. Download FreeBSD source using CVSUP by doing
cvsup /root/standard-supfile
2. Run the NDISGEN windows driver converter by doing
/usr/sbin/ndisgen
3. This creates a *.ko file. When I ran NDISGEN it this was created in my home directory.
4. Copy the .ko file to /boot/kernel/. In my case this was
cp /usr/home/me/i2220ntx_sys.ko /boot/kernel
5. Now edit loader.conf by doing
ee /boot/loader.conf
6. Add the following lines at the bottom of loader.conf
ndis_load=”YES” if_ndis_load=”YES” i2220ntx_sys_load=”YES”
*** The i2220ntx_sys part is replaced by the name of your *.ko file ***
7. Now lastly edit rc.conf by doing
ee /etc/rc.conf
8. I disabled the standard network card on my laptop as it made booting quicker so I have the following at the top of my rc.conf.
#Wireless only NIC=”ndis”
If you want both wireless and wired it would be (where rl is your network card).
#Wireless and Standard NIC=”rl ndis”
9. At the bottom of rc.conf add the following
ifconfig_ndis0=”inet netmask 255.255.255.0 ssid linksys” defaultrouter=”" hostname=”PCBSD.localhost”
** Make sure you input the ssid (name of your wireless connection) part of this otherwise it won’t work **
8. Lastly reboot freebsd. Once this is done open Konsole, login as root and type ifconfig. If everything is setup correctly NDIS will be listed and will show as “status: associated”
9. Thats it!
Hope this is helpful to anyone struggling to setup NDIS
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