Solaris Wifi

I was given a laptop by work the other day and told to put Solaris 10 on it. That in itself was simple enough, the trouble came with the wireless card. It didn't come up by default and took about a day to figure out how to get it working in Solaris. This is moslty me recording what I did so that if I have to do it again I can. So you know, the card is a Intel Pro/Wireless 2915ABG chipset. Without further ado, here's how it all went down.

1- Goto www.opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/wireless/wificonfig and follow
   the installation instructions.

2- Goto www.opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/wireless/iwi and follow the
   installations instructions.

3- run:
     update_drv -a -i '"pci8086,2711"' iwi
   (Note the quoting -- single then double quote -- these are required)
   (Note I'm assuming your pci id will be the same. I got this number by running
     prtconf -pv and it was under 'Network controller' there will also be
     an Ethernet controller this is the wired ethernet. So, take a look
     at prtconf -pv under 'Network controller' and see if the name is
     the same)

4- do a reconfigure reboot
     reboot -- -r

5- Get the sid of your wireless access point

6- execute
      wificonfig -i iwi0 connect gabriel
   (Note, gabriel is my sid, replace with yours) you'll see something like:
      wificonfig: no such profile, use the default setting

7- execute
      wificonfig -i iwi0 showstatus
   (Note this step isn't required, but will let you know if your connected
    to your sid) you'll see something like:
      linkstatus: connected
      active profile: none
      essid: gabriel
      encryption: none
      signal strength: strong(14)

8- Now it's time to setup your interface, execute:
     ifconfig iwi0 plumb

9- Assuming your using a dhcp server execute:
     ifconfig iwi0 dhcp

And that should be it. If your not using a dhcp server you'll have to do whatever
is needed to get all of the ipaddress, netmask and gateway stuff setup for the interface
at the end there.

If you don't know the sid if your local wireless hub you can execute:
  wificonfig -i iwi0 scan

and this will return information on all of the wireless hubs it finds.

# wificonfig -i iwi0 scan
essid   bssid             type          encryption      signallevel
gabriel 00:13:10:09:52:3f access point  none            13 

As a final side note, if you don't seem to have routing try doing:
  route add default 192.168.1.1
where 192.168.1.1 is replaced by the ip address of your gateway.

Update You may need to do the plumb for the wireless card before you'll be able to scan the network. Seems that the scan won't return anything till the card is plumbed (which makes sense). So, just move #8 up before #6 and it should all be good.

On a related side note, one of the guys here at work got the sound to work on the T43s, it's a simple matter of running:

  update_drv -i -a '"pci1014,567"' audio810

and unmuting your sound card. (If you're like me and don't run JDS you can add /usr/dt/bin to your path and run sdtaudiocontrol. You _have_ to have line out enabled in order to get sounds from the speakers.)k