Solaris and Wireless

Capt_Caveman · 09-24-2003, 10:59 PM

Anyone have luck getting 802.11 wireless cards to work with Solaris x86? I've checked the HCL at the Sun website, but the few cards they do mention seem to require 3rd party Lynnsoft drivers. This is kind of a "screwing around" project, so the probability of me paying $99 for a driver is about equal to the likelihood of me growing a tail.

Am I smoking crack, thinking that a wireless PCI card will work painlessly in Solaris or should I just bag it and try setting up a wireless bridge solution instead?

trickykid · 09-25-2003, 12:30 AM

Check this page out, list of Free NIC drivers for Solaris and mainly Wireless cards. Edited* Thought it was a page mainly for wireless cards but ended up being mainly just regular NIC's. I'll keep searching...

Capt_Caveman · 10-08-2003, 10:39 PM

Well I looked all over and didn't find much in the way of a free Solaris driver for a wireless card. So I said screw it and went with a Linksys WET11 wireless bridge instead. It took a little brainpower to work out the subnetting, but I at least got my solaris box online.

For anyone interested, the WET11 is a wireless "bridge" which connects to your PC via standard ethernet cable. It then forwards all your traffic (wirelessly) to your wireless access point (mine is a Linksys BEFW11S4). Probably a good solution for anyone looking to use 802.11, but doesn't want to screw around trying to get a wireless card to work. Which unfortunately seems to be the deal with Solaris.

trickykid · 10-09-2003, 10:06 AM

Thanks for the update. I'm sure one day setting up wireless and actually getting free drivers will be more easily obtainable than now.

amorrow · 11-23-2004, 03:49 PM

That link for "Free NIC drivers for Solaris", I think, would be

http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/

Andrew Morrow amorrow@noueausystems.com

amorrow · 11-23-2004, 04:11 PM

And here is that link for the commercial drivers:

http://www.lynnsoft.com/solaris.htm

jlliagre · 11-24-2004, 01:39 AM

Wireless drivers are being developed for Solaris 10.
It looks they will be made available either at the first release (January 2004) or an update (for 802.11G).

Two quotes from Sun blogs:

Quote:

Solaris Engineering is bringing Solaris into modern times with features and applications that our customers have been asking for. Stay tuned for more in the way of laptop support with Power Management, better ACPI, wireles drivers and much, much more.

Quote:

There will be quite a bit of 802.11b support, which will include most all of the Lucent, Intersil/PrismII, and Cisco 340/350 802.11b chipsets. These are all the 16-bit non-cardbus PCMCIA cards and some internal PCI. A lot of Atheros G support, many of the popular G cards that are available. Those are cardbus.

amorrow · 11-24-2004, 06:11 AM

That would be

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/aland/20040905

and

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/comments...iver_completes

jlliagre · 11-25-2004, 01:20 AM

Indeed, sorry for not providing the links, although google find them fast !