From owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jun 30 18:11:18 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 043F216A494 for ; Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:11:18 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dwinner-lists@att.net) Received: from mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net (mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net [204.127.131.117]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 31D7E43D55 for ; Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:11:16 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dwinner-lists@att.net) Received: from [192.168.0.214] (unknown[146.145.175.5]) by worldnet.att.net (mtiwmhc13) with ESMTP id <20060630181115113007oovoe>; Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:11:16 +0000 Message-ID: <44A568AF.9050102@att.net> Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 14:08:47 -0400 From: DW User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 (Windows/20060516) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Need Opinions on 3945ABG Wireless Card X-BeenThere: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Mobile computing with FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:11:18 -0000 Hi All, Just found out that the evaluation Thnkpad T60 I got (before we order 9 more) has an Intel 3945ABG wireless card for which there is no driver yet. I don't know how easy it would be to order the other T60's w/ alternate 11a/b/g cards (Atheros chipset, which I am told should work), and would rather not rock the boat at this time. I've done a lot of research and have found that Damien Bergamini is still involved in developing the driver for the 3945ABG, although he is focusing his efforts on OpenBSD. On May 14th, he committed it into OpenBSD as the wpi(4) driver. I suspect that there will be enough of us here who will need support for these 3945 cards, so I'm feeling that even if these laptops show up up next month, and have to sit in boxes for several weeks (probably would anyway, we're so busy with other things), I might be ok as far as having driver support into FreeBSD by that time, even if it's a matter of patching or installing a firmware port (like for iwi and ipw). What do you all think? What are the chances of getting burnt? Sure we'll still have our old trusty Orinoco pcmcia cards if worse comes to worse, but I really don't want to have to do that again. That's what happened on the T30's when we went to 5.4 and the driver for the cisco aironet was broken. Since I'm on this subject, I'm still struggling with sound on the T60 -- some have pointed to patches for the Hi Def driver, but it seems that mine is even newer (g), and haven't had success here either. It seems like this is evolving rapidly though, and will probably get better as more folks pick up the newer Thinkpads and others w/ this audio card. Opinions? Other than those two things, I still think the T60 is a damn fine piece of hardware, and installing 6.1 was easy, X was the easiest ever (Intel graphics accelerator card, which I was nervous about at first, since we always had the widely used radeon cards before, but it xorg picked it up w/ no problems and handled the display superbly). Thanks again for any input.