DLink G650 Wireless Network Adapter on *BSD

[Chaotic42]

Does anyone here use a DLink G650 wireless network adapter on their *BSD system? The reason I ask is that I had the PCI version of this card in my home computer using Debian. It worked, but it was very flaky. I mean, it would work maybe 10% of the time, it was very slow, and it would often just stop working in the middle of browsing or downloading.

So, does anyone have any personal experience with this card on *BSD? My home network has both a wireless and wired router, so I can use either. Should I just go buy another router for my room and stick to wired CAT5 (Mobility at home is not important, and they don't have wireless networking at school)?

Thanks.

 

[bersl2]

The DWL-G650, and I believe the PCI version of this product, use chipsets from Atheros. The hardware is IMO stable, as are the Linux drivers (MADWIFI project)---in fact, it's more stable than the Windows drivers in my experience. There's only two problems with the hardware: 1) It tends to have a smaller range than other WiFi hardware, and 2) Because of the simplistic nature of channel selection in the hardware, if the drivers were completely open, this would allow a user to tune the software-controlled radio to licensed frequencies, which is a violation of FCC regulations (so claims the project leader---I have not verified this for myself), and I infer that this theoretically could get Atheros in trouble. The solution is an open driver with the exception of a closed HAL module. But it's not all-GPL, so it won't ever make its way into the kernel.

But whatever. To answer your question, the MADWIFI drivers were first implemented for FreeBSD I believe and still retain a few wrapper functions. OpenBSD decided to do its own implementation, but they went ahead and reverse-engineered the HAL. But that's another story entirely. The point is, Atheros support in BSD looks rather good.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: bersl2
The point is, Atheros support in BSD looks rather good.

Thanks for the reply. I was reading a BSD forum and some people said that FreeBSD 6 has solid support for those drivers, but I wanted to get some confirmation here.

:beer: