Dale's Weblog

What about hardware support? I've gave Smoothwall a try, and had the pleasureable experience of finding out it didn't support my network cards from the Smoothwall website. Monowall seems promising as it is a Freebsd based distro unlike Smoothwall.
In your opinion Dale does freebsd have good hardware support, as you're very experienced with it. Should I bother trying out Monowall with my two Realtek network cards, on my Pentium II x86 platform?

1: Comment by Matthew - Mon, 27 Dec 2004 19:55:47 EST

Realtek network cards are like the most supported brand by any operating system I've seen.

My smoothwall box has:
A RealTEk RTL-8029 and a Digital 21x4x Tulip (100mbit)

While my FreeBSD box has:
Another RealTEk RTL-8029 and a RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX

You shouldn't have had problems with drivers on smoothwall and you shouldn't have problems with m0n0wall.

Again every x86 OS I've run supports Realtek stuff.

2: Comment by dale - Mon, 27 Dec 2004 20:17:23 EST

Yeah, I tried to use that for a bit, but there was something not-great about the installer… from memory, it wouldn't install to HDD or something *shrug* There's a post about it somewhere in the graveyard over at my website… Google searches it okay (site:www.joahua.com/mid04/ m0n0wall would work well as a query, maybe)

3: Comment by Josh - Tue, 28 Dec 2004 21:12:56 EST

Josh didn't have a pleasurable eperience with Smoothwall either http://www.joahua.com/blog/2004/10/05/routed-routers-and-css#more-81

4: Comment by Matthew - Wed, 29 Dec 2004 00:10:42 EST