HP G7-1272NR wireless lan not detected

[premjan]

I have an HP G7-1272NR 17.3-Inch Laptop. As per the spec on the HP web site the network/wireless are:
Network Card - 10/100 Ethernet LAN, Wireless Connectivity - 802.11b/g/n WLAN (not sure if the latter is the name of the wireless card or not?). I tried installing PCBSD (isotope) from a CD image. Actually I wanted to triple boot with Windows and Linux, but Windows got corrupted. PC-BSD was booting but didn't install to the hard disk properly. Eventually I decided to overwrite everything on the disk and install only PCBSD.

PCBSD installed and boots fine now, but my wireless card (see above) was not detected. I have a button (f12) which is supposed to toggle the wifi, doesn't work. I tried to modify rc.conf and wpa_supplicant.conf but it didn't activate the wifi (do I have to load additional modules?). I can't even seem to boot from CD thought the CD mounts if I insert it after PCBSD has booted. I tried various things at the boot loader prompt, such as boot -C but no success. If the network card is not supported I would like to wipe the disk and install Ubuntu as I had it earlier. Unfortunately I am not even sure how to do that. The ethernet adapter does work if I use a cable. But that's not really that much use as the only browser that comes by default with the CD installation seems to be w3m.

Any help would be appreciated. Either how to turn on the wifi or how to boot into and install Linux from CD.

Thanks.

[premjan]

re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=389b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING ,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC>
ether 10:1f:74:b4:66:5b
inet6 fe80::121f:74ff:feb4:665b%re0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect (none)
status: no carrier
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
options=3<RXCSUM,TXCSUM>
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
lagg0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=389b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING ,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC>
ether 10:1f:74:b4:66:5b
inet6 fe80::121f:74ff:feb4:665b%lagg0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect
status: no carrier
laggproto failover
laggport: re0 flags=1<MASTER>

[premjan]

I looked in the list of supported HP laptops and I do not see mine listed. Perhaps I should just try to install Linux? I am not even sure how to do that.

[bds]

it's hard to tell which wireless card you have installed in your laptop -- some googling and i don't see any specific information on it. however, there may be some hope (for additional help, try the IRC channel, too -- there's connection information here http://pcbsd.org/index.php?option=co...mid=77&lang=en .... i'm no expert so take all of this with a grain of salt).

post the output of

dmesg -a | grep Wireless

or

dmesg -a | grep wireless

(if the first one doesn't return any results)

or try

pciconf -lv | grep wireless

(or try it with Wireless, instead)

while you're compiling all of that, take a look at the FreeBSD Handbook's section on Wireless Networking here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...-wireless.html

HTH!

[premjan]

I looked up system info and found the wireless is RALINK RT5390. After I tried to install GRUB I lost PC-BSD too. When I tried booting into Puppy Linux for which I had a CD lying around it didn't detect the wireless card either. And I think my windows recovery disk was no good. I'll get back to you here if I boot into BSD again and get a change to try dmesg/pciconf. Thanks.

[bds]

if you opt to reinstall PC-BSD, (& when you're back up and running) run the following from a terminal window:

man -k RALINK

and read the man pages for the following:
ral(4) - Ralink Technology IEEE 802.11 wireless network driver
rum(4) - Ralink Technology USB IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network device
run(4) - Ralink Technology USB IEEE 802.11a/g/n wireless network device
runfw(4) - Firmware Module for Ralink driver
ural(4) - Ralink Technology RT2500USB IEEE 802.11 driver

cheers!

[premjan]

ral(4) seems like the right man page, will give it a shot.

[premjan]

following lines in /boot/loader.conf

if_ral_load="YES"
runfw_load="YES"
if_rum_load="YES"
if_run_load="YES"
if_ural_load="YES"

No luck though, I think some of those lines are actually redundant as it complained stuff was already loaded.

Any options, short of writing my own wireless driver?

[bds]

one of the more experienced users will have to help at this point -- i'm occasionally having hard-to-pinpoint wireless issues myself.

pastebin the output of

dmesg -a

and

pciconf -lv

and hopefully someone can give a (better & more complete) diagnosis.

sorry i can't be of more help.

PS you might try giving your /etc/rc.conf -- maybe something is missing there.

[premjan]

dmesg -a
pciconf -lv
rc.conf
Ordered Windows recovery disk, will put PC-BSD back on though if I can get the wifi working.