Installing WLI-CB-G54S (aka Buffalo AirStation 125 High Speed Mode) on FreeBSD-Release-6.0

This is a guide to install a Buffalo's WLI-CB-G54S wireless PCMCIA network adapter in FreeBSD-Release-6.0. I wrote this because I couldn't find one when I had this problem.

You might have tried to insert the card and got a message like this:

cardbus0: <network> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)

which of course means your system has no driver for it. Buffalo provides drivers only for Windows operating systems, so we must convert a Windows(r) driver to a FreeBSD kernel module. To do this we use ndisgen(8).

If you execute command "pciconf -lv" there should be following (or similar) information about the card:

none3@pci2:0:0: class=0x028000 card=0x032e1154 chip=0x432014e4 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00

  vendor = 'Broadcom Corporation'
  device = 'BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller'
  class = network

Buffalo's own drivers don't build with ndisgen for some reason, but Dell has drivers that do so we use them. Go to www.dell.com and search for "WLAN Network Adapter Card" and you should find Dell's PCMCIA wlan drivers. They are in a self-extracting .exe which you can either run in a Windows machine or open with an archiver. Copy files bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys to your freebsd system and run "ndisgen bcmwl5.inf bcmwl5.sys" in the same directory. After you've pressed enter few times the program will build bcmwl5_sys.ko kernel module. Copy that file to /boot/kernel and now you can run

"kldload bcmwl5_sys"

To make the module load at startup add line

bcmwl5_sys_load="YES"

to /boot/loader.conf. If you now insert the card you should get something like this:

ndis0: <Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card> mem 0x88000000-0x88001fff irq 11 at device 0.0 on cardbus0 ndis0: NDIS API version: 5.0 ndis0: Ethernet address: 00:07:40:fa:01:c5

"ifconfig" should include this or similar:

ndis0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500

  ether 00:07:40:fa:01:c5
  media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect
  status: no carrier
  ssid "" channel 1
  authmode OPEN privacy OFF txpowmax 100 protmode CTS

Now you have your card installed. Read [Networking] from FreeBSD handbook to learn to configure your wireless network.

To install WLI-CB-G54S on earlier FreeBSD check this site.

This guide was made by Teemu Korhonen and ripped word for word from http://koti.mbnet.fi/venefics/wlan_guide.php . This guide has not yet worked for me.