Alta's HowTo's Complement
Thursday Mar 22, 2007
Need a Wireless Driver?
The Solaris OS provides the ath(7D) driver for Atheros AR52xx 802.11b/g wireless NICs. Sun has several other wireless drivers under development that you can access today.
Go to http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/wireless/. Click the name of a driver to see what devices that driver supports and to get download, installation, and configuration information for that driver, including how to use ifconfig(1M) and wificonfig(1M) with that driver. The wificonfig utility is a command line wireless LAN configuration utility.
| Driver | Devices Supported |
| cardbus | Nexus driver with support for 32-bit PC Cards |
| ipw | Intel Pro/Wireless 2100B Chipset |
| iwi | Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG/2915ABG Chipsets |
| pcwl | Agere/Prism-II 802.11b Chipsets |
| pcan | Cisco Aironet 340/350 Chipsets |
| ral | Ralink RT2500 802.11b/g Chipset |
| rtw | Realtek 8180 802.11b Chipset |
| wpa | WPA/WPA2/IEEE802.1X supplicant |
Click the name of the driver on the OpenSolaris wireless site to see a list of specific devices supported by each driver. If your device is not listed, but a similar device is listed, try to use the driver for the similar device. See the instructions in “Assigning a New Device to an Existing Driver in the Solaris OS” for adding device support in the /etc/driver_aliases file.
Before you install one of these drivers, make sure you are running either Solaris 10 or Solaris Express. See additional requirements, notes, and FAQs when you click the name of the driver on the OpenSolaris wireless site.
Use the inetmenu graphical network configuration tool to “easily manage your wired, wireless, and dial-up network configurations.” The inetmenu tool is a GUI network configurator tool that plumbs and sets the right route and DNS and works with NIS.
See also the Network Auto-Magic OpenSolaris site. NWAM is “a project to simplify and automate network configuration on Solaris.”
Use the frkit tool to keep up-to-date with these drivers and to get additional goodies such as a battery meter for some laptops.
When the above drivers are integrated into the Solaris OS, of course you will not need to download, install, and configure them. So watch for release announcements and watch the Solaris for x86 Device Support page for new wireless support.
Posted at 03:23PM Mar 22, 2007 by alta in Device Support | Comments[6]
Posted by Dick Davies on March 23, 2007 at 01:13 AM PDT #
Posted by Alta Elstad on May 14, 2007 at 08:18 AM PDT #
Posted by Dick Davies on May 14, 2007 at 08:40 AM PDT #
Posted by RaviC on May 26, 2007 at 03:03 PM PDT #
Posted by Alta Elstad on May 28, 2007 at 11:34 AM PDT #
Posted by Alta Elstad on June 12, 2007 at 08:40 PM PDT #