Nico's blog

Realtek 8188EU on FreeBSD

Context

As I mentioned in my previous article about moving to a more recent laptop to run FreeBSD, the only thing I wanted to improve was the Wifi connectivity.

I did some research, and eventually went for a TP-Link TL-WN725N, running an 8188EU Realtek chipset.

This article is mostly meant for me to remember how I did it - but as usual, it may be useful to others.

Commands

1. Create the wireless device

 ifconfig wlan create wlandev rtwn0

This created wlan1 in my case, since wlan0 already existed.

2. Add the below to /etc/rc.conf:

 wlans_rtwn0="wlan1"
 ifconfig_wlan1="WPA SYNCDHCP"

3. Load the realtek driver at book, by adding the below to /boot/loader.conf:

 if_rtwn_usb_load="YES"
 legal.realtek.license_ack=1

4. Reboot, and voilà!

I didn't modify wy /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf since it already worked and existed, but of course if you're starting from scratch, you'll have to create one with the relevant details.

EDIT 2024/11/19: Peter pointed out on Twitter that:

Follow-up

It looks like the lines in boot/loader.conf are not needed - I disabled them and upon reboot, the Wifi dongle was still recognised and worked perfectly. So it's probable that it's part of the FreeBSD kernel by default after all!

Tags: FreeBSD