Wireless networking under FreeBSD for Dell Inspiron 600m

I am really impressed with the ease of using FreeBSD. I could get the wireless working on my Dell Insipron 600m within half an hour and now I am writing this blog using the firefox browser on FreeBSD.

The wireless chipset with Dell Inspiron 600m is Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2100. I had to implement the following steps to get the wireless card working with FreeBSD 6.1.

1) Installed the required drivers and firmware for the card by doing the following

cd /usr/ports/net/ipw-firmware/
make install clean
This installed the required firmware for the card.

kldload if_ipw
This loaded the kernel module containing the driver.

2) Edited my /etc/rc.conf and added the following two lines
ipwcontrol -i ipw0 -f /boot/firmware/ipw.fw
ifconfig_ipw0="ssid MYSSID wepkey WEBKEY weptxkey 1 wepmode on DHCP"
where MYSSID is the SSID of my wireless network and WEBKEY is 104 bit webkey.

After this I simply executed the command

/etc/rc.d/netif stop
followed by

/etc/rc.d/netif start
And I had my wireless card working.


3) In addition I edited my /boot/loader.conf so that the drivers get loaded automatically on a reboot
wlan_wep_load="YES"
if_ipw_load="YES"

Worshipping the Devil

I don't why but today I installed FreeBSD 6.1 on my laptop after getting rid of Ubuntu Linux , the reason being I am planning to start doing some FreeBSD development in my spare time. The couple of reasons of moving over to FreeBSD development from Linux development are

1) I really like the BSD license over GPL. I think it is more commercial friendly. Now since I am a capitalistic pig, I believe in welfare of others through profit. Thou shall prosper and I think BSD license facilitates this.

2) The developer competition seems to be less for FreeBSD. Please be aware I am not saying that FreeBSD developers are in anyway technically less superior than the Linux folks. What I mean is there seems to be less number of hands helping the FreeBSD project. Also I am hoping the noise is less on the FreeBSD list and more opportunity to contribute.

3) Like the BSD philosophy of not "windows bashing". I think Microsoft Windows is as (or even more) important as Unix based systems. Also having so much of diversity enables more opportunities for work because of interoperatibility.

Enough of that, so right now I have got FreeBSD working along with my favorite widowing environment WindowMaker. The next steps that I need to take are

1) Get the Ethernet and the wireless working.

2) Get vpnc and rdesktop working, so that if required I do office work on my laptop.

3) Find something like User Mode Linux to start experimenting with the BSD kernel.

It's not a perfect world....

.....Hence most of the people still use windoze instead of Mac/Linux. However recently I have heard people complaining about Mac as well so I strongly encourage people to use ubuntu Linux.

Considering the number of people using windoze I have decided to learn to C# programming since I think this is the quickest way for me to develop apps for windows. However the fun apart of learning this language is that I am still using Linux, thanks to an open source project called mono which has ported the .NET framework to Linux. It was extremely easy to get the .NET environment working on Linux. I simply downloaded the mono source, untared the tar ball, compiled and installed the environment. I could quickly write my first C# program after this.

I am really amazed with what open source has done to the computer industry. Can you believe that java is open source as well. Click here for more information.

PGAP v0.1 released

Check out the webpage here

Been away....

Have been really busy since past few weeks. Mostly with work, then with Diwali, friends visiting and my trips to Wilkesboro over the weekend. Diwali was fun with Tanu visiting me at Raleigh, along with Bonda and Bully. It was mostly about food, some diyas and lots of movies including disappointing Don.

Have been working on developing a genetic algorithm framework in Python called as PGAP (Python Genetic Algorithm Package). Have implemented the cubic solver and TSP (traveling salesman problem) using it. I am really excited (and also proud) for having developed it from scratch using my favorite scripting language, Python. (Damn, I am so addicted to python that I have been using it a lot for automating tasks for my work as well). I have completed the code and am now in the process of documenting it as well as developing web pages for it.