[TriLUG] FreeBSD: An Exercise in Pain

[Ben Pitzer]

Mike,

Well, first of all, if you had trouble installing Debian, I highly
recommend avoiding the FreeBSD install for a while.  It really is for
advanced users.  As for the network card, what is the chipset of the
card?  Your exact card make and model might not be in the list, but the
chipset might be covered under a much more generic driver, especially if
it's a highly common chipset.  The 3Com 90x chipset is very common, but
not having installed FreeBSD in a while, I'm not sure what to tell you
to look for in the driver list.  Under linux, a 3c90x driver would do
it, but that's under Linux.  I'm not sure what the maturity level of
FreeBSD's hardware detection tools might be.  As I said, it's been a
while, but if you put aside your frustrations and just ask for some
friendly assistance, I'm sure that most folks who have experience with
FreeBSD would be more than happy to give you some help.  Just be
patient.

Regards,
Ben Pitzer


On Fri, 2002-05-24 at 21:05, Mike Helms wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> FreeBSD looks fantastic.  I wish I could install it.
> 
> When I do the kernel configuration, I am greeted with seven network card
> driver conflicts.  OK, fine, I remove the offending drivers and go in search
> of the 3Com 90x series driver for my garden variety 10/100 network card.  Is
> it there, in the list?  I think not ... the documentation says that there's
> a driver (the xl0 driver), and just about anything that I try isn't working.
> I have initiated this install procedure about a hundred times now - and
> every time I get to the network configuration part of the OS, there is not a
> 3Com 90x network card to be seen.
> 
> What the hell is going on here?  I have searched high and low in the
> installation and nowhere do these mythical drivers exist.  Is the system
> supposed to find them itself?  If so, it's doing a lousy job.
> 
> For what it's worth, this is FreeBSD version 4.5, downloaded from their FTP
> site yesterday.
> 
> Cheers,
> -- Mike Helms
> _______________________________________________
> TriLUG mailing list
>     http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> TriLUG Organizational FAQ:
>     http://www.trilug.org/~lovelace/faq/TriLUG-faq.html
>