This posting outlines my successful methods for getting the Demarctech (http://www.demarctech.com)"Reliawave™ 180mW PCMCIA Wireless Card" running under freeBSD 4.6.0 stable.

The Reliawave™ is a high-output prism2.5 based card, with a unique and desirable antenna configuration.

This posting will also present an empirical manner of getting many prism2 /prism2.5 cards to be recognized and supported by the "wi" driver.

Insert card and power on system, you will likely get an error message:

<your_host> pccardd[]: No card in database for " "("IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN/PC Card")

Please notate the two strings between the quotation marks(""). In this case:

" " (space)
"IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN/PC Card"

These strings can also be queried directly from this, or any card.

man pccardc
pccardc dumpcis
Optionally you can define a pcmcia slot number, usu. 0 or 1.
pccardc dumpcis 0

The relevent output is below:

Tuple #4, code = 0x15 (Version 1 info), length = 39
000: 05 00 20 00 49 45 45 45 20 38 30 32 2e 31 31 20
010: 57 69 72 65 6c 65 73 73 20 4c 41 4e 2f 50 43 20
020: 43 61 72 64 00 00 ff
Version = 5.0, Manuf = [ ], card vers = [IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN/PC Card]
Addit. info = []

The "Manuf", and "card vers" fields hold the values we desire to record.

Check for a file "/etc/pccard.conf", if it is not found, copy it from "/etc/defaults/pccard.conf"

It is desirable to make any changes in "/etc/pccard.conf" leaving "/etc/defaults/pccard.conf" untouched. The former overrides the later.

Look for the heading that marks the beggining of "wi" device section. I placed my enty at the end of this section. Add an entry that looks like this:

# Demarctech Reliawave
card " " "IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN/PC Card"
config auto "wi" ? 0x10000
insert /etc/pccard_ether $device start
remove /etc/pccard_ether $device stop

*note: The first pair of quotation marks are enclosing a space char.
*note: excerpt from "pccard.conf"

Make sure that you use tabs rather than multiple spaces for new entires like the old ones. <tab>keyword<tab>arguments.

In keeping with this format, there is a tab following: config, insert, and remove.

Save your changes, you do not neccesarily have to reboot, if the card is still in it's slot, you should be able to eject, and replace the card, pccardd should read the config out of pccard.conf, and allocate the proper resources to your card.

There is also a route to explicitly configure any pcmcia card.

man pccardc enabler

It is more desirable to let pccardD load device drivers, as the managment and allocation of system resources is required.

If you need to get ahold of me:
Nick: PHiZ
server: irc.nyc2600.org
Online Store- Office: 207-244-9068 | efax: 207-433-1008