One of the biggest complaints people have with the BSD community is a lack of wireless drivers and the lack of a full featured wireless stack. Part of this has to do with manufacturers release drivers for Linux for their products, but very rarely do you ever see a *BSD driver. And, most hardware is not open source so the specs to write a driver can be hard to come by. But you can run wireless on a freebsd laptop. Here is the steps to get it to work and how I configured it on my Lenovo Thinkpad laptop.
Required reading is the chapter 34 of the Freebsd handbook. It talks extensively about all the options allowed for networking. Now there are a ton of various options there and I will boil this down to the bare minimum to get networking started on a laptop connecting to your home wireless router.
First we need some love for the /etc/rc.conf file. Add the following lines to your rc.conf:
# wireless setup
wlans_iwlwifi0="wlan99" # substitute your wireless interface for the iwlwifi0 (intel) one I use
create_args_wlan99="wlanmode sta regdomain FCC country US" # obiously fix for your country
ifconfig_wlan99="WPA SYNCDHCP"
ifconfig_wlan99_ipv6="inet6 accept_rtadv"
defaultrouter="192.168.69.1" # put in your wireless router's ip address
defaultroute_delay="0"
The next thing we need is a file /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. This is the file that has the password
and name of the wireless network you need to connect to. My file is as follows(obviously the
password has been changed):
network={
ssid="GoodInTheWoods"
psk="SuperSecretPassword!"
}
Now you have to reboot your computer or run "service netif restart". I have had better luck with just
restarting the computer to make sure everything is clean. Now we can run a test. Run the following
command to see if you can connect to the wireless network:
# wpa_supplicant -Dbsd -iwlan99 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
IF all goes well you will see your computer connected to the wireless network.
Now with FreeBSD 15 there has been a focus on laptop support and I read that the wireless drivers would be improved. As it stands now my laptop can only connect at 11g (54Mbps) and not at AC or N or any of the higher rates. Hopefully that will change with FreeBSD 15.