It occurs to me I haven't done a lot of whacked out speculating in a while, so let me give it a shot.
Those with the PCI variant Linksys device (the WMP54G) may have an opportunity that those of us with the Cardbus device may not.
Remember that the Apple device is mini-PCI. Electrically there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between true mini-PCI and regular PCI. It's all just wiring.
Apple's Airport Extreme module isn't true mini-PCI, but I would not be at all surprised if all they did was rearrange some of the pins and remove some of the unnecessary ones.
Broadcom makes the chips that make up the functional parts of both devices. But both devices have different PCI vendor and device ID numbers. So there's clearly a ROM of some sort (actually according to Broadcom's Product Brief, it's a 1 kilobit ROM with a lot more than just those two numbers).
So the big question of the day is this: how similar are the two implementations? Are they the same except for the contents of the FLASH? If so, then all you'd have to do is reprogram the Linksys card's ROM with the contents of Apple's ROM and all of a sudden it's as if you really do have an actual Apple AirPort Extreme module! The best part of that is that you won't have to engage in the driver hacks to get the driver to work - it will just work!
We CardBus folks aren't so lucky. CardBus devices have a different device identification scheme because of the PCCard legacy they have to live with. So there is no way we'd ever be able to use Apple's FLASH. So the correlary here is that if (when?) Apple releases any "updaters" or other programs that look like they might want to reflash your device, don't do it to your CardBus card! You may be able to do well on a PCI device, but be prepared to have your card destroyed if the reflash procedure doesn't work right.
Posted by nsayer at February 17, 2003 08:29 PM