Dell with Intel 5300 wireless card

First attempt to boot A3 on a Dell Latitude E6400 failed, with a completely unresponsive machine immediately after the desktop changed to blue. Safe Mode boot was OK. I discovered that if I disabled the Intel 5300 AGN wireless card in the BIOS, A3 would boot successfully without Safe Mode. Later I found that by moving wireless drivers from their proper place to a desktop folder, A3 would boot successfully even with the wireless card enabled in the BIOS.

Not having wireless, however, is a pain. I travel a lot, and hotels often have wireless but no RJ45. Apparently there was an experimental driver for the 5100 (perhaps the 5300 too) as far back in 2009 on haikuware, but even if haikuware was up again I’m relucatant to try an unofficial driver that old. Suggestions? This is an employer-issued laptop and I don’t have the luxury of replacing the 5300 with another wifi card.

You should avoid using non-Haiku drivers. They likely won’t work anyways.

There might be some type of conflict between your wired and wireless network adapters. Remove the drivers for your wired network card, add back the wireless and see what happens.

You should also check if your wireless card is supported by Haiku’s driver. Do listdev in terminal and compare the vendor ID (Intel=0x8086) & device ID to ones listed in link below:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/src/add-ons/kernel/drivers/network/wlan/iprowifi4965/dev/iwn/if_iwn.c#L307

I strongly suggest making a dual boot system with either Linux or Windows. Or at very least bringing a LiveCD like Ubuntu.

Haiku is Alpha and is meant more for testing and playing with. Kinda risky to use it as your single OS.

I agree with everything Tones said. I would add that you can install Haiku onto a USB flash drive and boot from it. You can then use that flash drive to boot from any PC that can boot from a USB drive. It’s pretty cool.

My system is dual-boot; I don’t have a death wish!

Removing the Ethernet driver makes no difference. Apparently iprowifi4965 thinks it can drive the 5300 card (and that’s what the comments in the source code indicate), but it hangs. Intel provides a driver for Linux (iwlwifi) that handles the 4965, the 5300, and several other variants – but there must be enough of a difference between the 4965 and the 5300 to trip up iprowifi4965.

You can search here for similar issues:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/search

You will have to file a bug report and should include your syslog otherwise maybe useless. The syslog should show what is causing the freeze you are having.
http://dev.haiku-os.org

Haiku uses mostly FreeBSD network drivers. Almost all the wireless ones are from FreeBSD. It maybe an IRQ or driver issue. New ticket with syslog attached should help figure it out and very least let developers know about this issue.