I recently installed FreeBSD 5.3 on my laptop, a dated Toshiba 2065CDS. In linux, I had considerable difficulty in getting the PCMCIA controller to work, but it seems to work fine under FreeBSD. My wifi card is a Wavelan Classic Gold, using the wi driver. The card is seen fine, the lights blink, and I can see the interface wi0 in ifconfig. I set the IP to 192.168.1.20(an unused IP, valid on my network), the hostmask to the correct value of 255.255.255.0, and SSID and channel to that of my router, a Linksys WRT54G. Since the card is working at a hardware level, I figured I'd be all set, but the card does not connect. I always see status: no carrier under ifconfig. Any ideas? I'm going to try to bring the laptop to school and see if I can connect to an apple airport there, but I think there's a system configuration error I'm missing here. Any ideas?

If your AP uses encryption, do you have the keys enabled for it?

I'm not terribly familiar with that card, but I'd bet that it's not associating with the AP. When you bring the laptop up, look at the "Connected Clients" or whatever in your AP (You'll have to do this on another computer, obviously).

Barring that -- What does the output of wicontrol and wicontrol -o look like?