The driver either supports your hardware or it doesn't. Do you know which hardware/driver was involved?

I have to admit that though NetBSD's wireless/wpa_supplicant setup does seem a bit messy, it worked ok for me last time I tried it (7.1.x release I think).

If it's an Atheros device, first appearing 7.0-release, the athn(4) driver was ported from OpenBSD (as were most of the wifi drivers in NetBSD), which adds support for the ath9xxx devices.

It could well have been Atheros, as I have several of them on my machines, & they do work on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD works fine for me; just thought I'd give NetBSD another go whilst I was messing about with my older computers; I'm not so keen on FreeBSD these days, as it seems to take a lot of disk space for the same basic setup.

What the wiki fails to mention is what happens if /var and/or /usr are mounted on separate disk slices. wpa_supplicant(8) will fail to start from rc.conf unless you add the line
to rc.conf. That was my problem.

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant (from wpa_supplicant.conf) is on /var
/usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant is on /usr.

/var should already be part of critical_filesystems_local, /usr as I recall is not.

Hence
Should do it.

It was reported as a bug years ago, but closed: https://marc.info/?l=netbsd-bugs&m=117909571019490&w=2

And more recently: https://marc.info/?l=netbsd-bugs&m=145639160309185&w=2

Can We not un-stick this thread?


This thread was started what 14 years ago? NetBSD as of now is on 9.0. Released last month.
I have just put it on my main Box after years on Debian.

Has NetBSD finally got a stable founding?

I cannot see why a 2006 opinion is sticky.
Especially if it's not helpful or useful in any way.

Because the particular question raised in this thread is a repeating one.

I picked it up around 7.0 and it has gotten better. It did seem a bit stale at that point (no USB3 or UEFI in 2017!), but has since added those. It does seem like it started picking up speed, after a few years of stagnation. Some of the less popular ports are kind of stale and I have had trouble getting engagement when trying to fix problems with the kernel in a particular one. A common complaint seems to be unsupported wireless and video, but I would say this is more of a problem with the way those technologies are developed (not OSS friendly or drivers are GPL licensed and therefore not BSD compatible). The BSDs have to rewrite every driver Linux gets for free from hardware manufactures, so it never gets a break, even if the driver is open-sourced.

One thing I like is the init system seems fairly close to the Slackware one. The main difference I see is most init configuration is contained in /etc/rc.conf instead of config files in /etc/rc.d/

Why not pickup 9.2 ? 7.0 is rather old and I think out of support.

I tried it fairly recently, but it still seems to have wifi issues, I tried all the ways suggested, without any luck connecting.

I have. What I wrote was in the past tense, as in I started using it when 7.0 was the stable release.

Is the WiFi chipset you have known to be supported? The devs have mentioned WiFi is one of the areas of focus at the moment, so it should be better with the next release.
https://netbsd.org/support/hardware/

My wifi chips are supposed to be supported, & they worked in OpenBSD, which is where I believe NetBSD got the code - it seems to be in the implementation of the software that something doesn't quite work.

But I only try with it to keep abreast of what may work on my computers, in case Linux suffers more from 'big business' interference, (systemd/pulseaudio), things that I am not keen on.

My guess would be it needs a firmware binary to work. I've seen people ask questions on IRC about WiFi not working, and it seems more times than not, if the chipset is supported, needing a binary for the firmware to load.