If the Ports Collection and pkg must be used in conjunction, then be sure that your Ports Collection and pkg are on the same branch release of the ports tree. The menu also allows changing the serial port's baud rate from the default of baud, 8 data bits, no parity and one stopbit. To install a binary package pkg-install 8 can be used. It uses FreeBSD jails to set up isolated compilation environments. Note my example, above, where I just used "ipw-firmware" without additional information.
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