OS X Hax

Will the AirPort 3.1 update also work with 3rd party 802.11A & G combined PC of PCI Cards, and allow usage of both protocols? Or does this update work with 802.11G only cards?

With the new airport software 3.1 and the linksys 54g pc card the drop down menu under 10.2.6 says that it is a 802.11b broadcom. Is this correct?

I just got the linksys 802.11g card and was going to install drivers but read this! I have an apple airport as well, and ended up with four airport popdowns now.

Do I still need to disable the apple kernel extensions, or do I need to remove the airport in order for this to work with 3.1?

:( panther no longer recognizes my g linksys card as "hot swappable". i can start up with the card in, but if i try to remove it before shutting down, kernel panic. if i try to insert it while it's running, kernel panic. anyone know if one of the older perl scripts would work?

Nick and others: Is there any reason to prefer one b/g PCMIA card versus another (such as Linksys v. Asante) for use on original TiBook (replacing internal Airport Card in order to have b/g compatibility and better antenna)?

Asante card does not seem to be shipping yet.

I have been reading your site with great interest for quite a while. I love making old things work, and I have got a PM 8500 running pretty darn good with a G3 upgrade and OSX in it. It is pretty fun. It would be icing on the cake if I could get the Proxim Skyline 802.11b PCI wireless card working as well.
I am not an Uber-hacker like some of your readers, so could you please let me know if it is possible? I can't seem to figure out how to get this to work. Keep in mind, I am just having fun with this, it is not urgent or anything!

Jim

Hey anyone know if there will be support for the tri mode cards example like the new dlink cards and orinoco cards that have A B and G on them? at the same time

thanks for the time

Just put a Belkin PCMCIA 802.11g card in my 800Mhz TiBook and it is performing flawlessly. No configuration necessary. In fact, it replaced my internal Airport card as the Airport card of choice in the Airport Status widget at the upper left of the screen and I am now running 100% native to my Airport Extreme Base.

Cheers,

chu

Is there a way to switch between an internal AirPort card and an 802.11g PC card on the fly? Right now you can't even have the AirPort card installed.

Thanks.

- Winston

I tried inserting the card while the TiBook was running and it worked. Took the place of my internal card.

However, when I remove it, it says there is no Airport card installed. I have to restart to get it to recognize the internal card.

Still, not too bad to have G and longer range.

- chu

All this .11g support from ver 3.1 got me excited. I have an Orinoco silver 11b card and was using the sourceforge driver with OS 10.2.6 so..... thought I would try the new airport driver instead. Uninstalled sourceforge, installed 3.1 and restarted.

Partial success. Yes, I got a connection to my old ABS without WEP but no control via airport interface. The airport icon does not appear in the menu bar.

Any ideas??

v3.1 caused all my windows (Lucent Gold PCMCIA) clients to not be able to connect with WEP to my Airport Extreme. How do I uninstall 3.1/5.1?

Greetings: Everything works great using Linksys hardware (both Wireless Router and PCMCIA card) on my Apple PowerBook G4. Problem: Encryption does not function!! Hints? Ideas? Anybody got a Whitepaper on this? HELP!! Any assistance will be appreciated and rewarded! Thank you!

ph4cr

I got a couple of 3Com 802.11g cards advertised as fully 802.11g compliant. They are not broadcom, however, they are Prism GT chip based. They advertise they are the first chipset to be actually compliant. I tried one in my 500mhz TiBook and it does not work. The TiBook knows it has an 802.11g card if you look in "about this mac" but it does not show an airport connection. Any ideas for fooling the mac into accepting it?

Prism GT chipset cards will not work with the AppleAirPort2.kext driver. There was talk that the Prism GT folks would come out with their own driver, but like all 3rd party 802.11 drivers, it probably won't be as tightly integrated with the OS.

Does anyone know of a 802.11G PCMCIA card which will work with 10.2.6/AirPort 3.1 with an external antenna connector (like the MC connector on the Orinoco Gold and Silver)?

Has anyone had any luck switching between an internal AirPort card and an external PCMCIA card without removing the internal AirPort card in a TiBook?

I've read several stories that their Broadcom-based 802.11g cards work fine with no problem. I seem to be having nothing but problems. I tried the Buffalo card (WLI-CB-G54A ... which for whoever was asking, has an external antenae connector), and got kernel panics when the card was inserted, as well as a freeze if the computer booted with the card in.

Thinking the card was bad, I exchanged it up for the Linksys card (WPC54G), and had the same situation: kernel panics on insert, and freeze on boot. I'm running 10.2.6 with AirPort 3.1.1, and the only other software installed are the system updates (in other words, this is a fresh install) on a PowerBook G3 Series (Lombard). Any suggestions?

-- Rob

I'm on a Lombard as well, 10.2.6, with the Linksys card, and every recent update that applies. I'm beginning to think WiFi is merely Apple's way of making us by new machines.

The Airport base station has never worked. I can't even begin to get it to reset so I could try any of the suggested hacks, which seem to be written in a cryptic shorthand I've yet to decipher.

Does one need to know the secret handshake to get clear and concise information on how to get Airport Extreme to work with Linksys?

In response to "cate": You said you are using a Linksys card as well. Is this card being used in your Lombard? If so, what speed is the processor, as I've heard reports of Lombards @ 400MHz running fine with the card, but mine runs @ 333MHz. Perhaps the hardware is just incompatible?

-- Rob

Do you know if I can make a Sitecom WL-100 pc card work on 10.2.6 (airport 3.1.1)?

It is based on the Intersil ISL3890 chip. When I insert it appears the pc card icon on the upper right bar...but no control appears in the Network panel.

Thanks in advance

Paolo

The PC Card menu appears for any PC Card that you insert. It merely identifies the card, and allows you to power it off so you can safely remove it. The AirPort 3.1.1 software has been reported to work with *only* Broadcom based cards. (I can't verify this, as two different Broadcom-based cards are giving me kernel panics.) You might want to check out the WirelessDriver project at http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net/ and see if your chipset is supported. I know Prism-based cards are (such as the WaveLAN), but not sure about yours.

-- Rob

Airport setup assistant doesn't recognize my WMP11 under Mac OS X 10.2.8. Do you think it's because I was unlucky enough to get the 'broken' update? Has anyone else been able to get the WMP11 to work under any version of OS X?

If so, please email or post here with some advice.

Can i ask a question?
Has any one tried to use a 3rd party cardbus type 11g wireless NIC with a 3rd party 11g access point station on the TiBook?

Hi, may i ask another question?
I have bought a pair of Buffalo 11g product, i.e. WBR-G54 and WLI-CB-G54.
When i insert the cardbus WLAN card, the cardbus icon displayed on the right top of the finder shows implicitly 802.11b even if i configure the airstation to '802.11g only' state. After my simple test, i make a FTP connection to another PC via my TiBook with this cardbus WLAN card. The data rate is only 50 kByte/sec. However, in the another test, the speed of the FTP connection between two PCs becomes 1000kByte/sec. Can anyone help me to overcome this problem?

Hi;

I am in search of a PCI 802.11g card to use with my G4 dual 533 (running 10.2.6) and my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. What are my options?

Thanks;
John

I have the same problem Jim has my skyline 11 from farallon (now proxim) is not working on osx.
Is there anybody out there that would be able to help?
Thank you in advance.
Andrea.

I have a g3 powerbook (firewire/usb) that I would like to put either an 11.b or a 11.g pcmcia card in to connect to a local wireless net (not airport). Does anyone know which cards are supported by osx (jaguar and panther?). Any advice on this is appreciated. Thanks,
Ric

Just a quick note to report that that Linksys WMP54G works great with Airports as well as non-apple wireless routers like Linksys.
http://www.linksys.com/Products/product.asp?prid=520&scid=36

John

yes linksys pci card will work in panther. I installed worked flawlessly untill I decided to update the airport software to 3.2. Anyone know of a fix? Can I go back to provious Airport version? If so how does on do it?

I'm lookin for an update for my belkin pcmia wireless network card (802.11b 54g) for windows me. does anyone have a link they can post for this driver, as the one on the installation disk doesnt seem to want to work.

I have bought a Buffalo 54GA for my G4 Tibook and have managed to connect to my Draytek 2600We. I can connect to the shared folders on my PC but cannot connect to the internet. Pinging the router is fine, but pinging external ip addresses does not work.

I disabled the internal card by renaming the AppleAirPort.kext and AppleAirPortFW.kext files.

I had to manually set the ip address for the Buffalo as it seems to ignore dhcp assigned ones and assign itself one 169.254.111.xxx . But the DNS does not seem to work.

Also getting occassional kernel panics, particularly on restart.

Further investigation has pointed to loss of DNS (via Ethernet connection too) when DHCP changed to DHCP with manual IP address.

Anyone know of a way to stop the Buffalo from assigning itself an IP address?

I have not found success with Airport 3.4 on OSX 10.3.4. I have tried the Linksys WPC54Gv.4 (which has been confirmed to be broadcom chipset), but the card will not be identified correctly. Is there any way to give it a push?

Cheers,

fellow

Hello, Has anybody out there managed to configure a Sitecom Wireless Access point using Airport Set-up/Admin, or even virtual PC. I have it functioning but am unable to configure it for security purposes, on a Ti Powerbook using Belkin 54g pc card.

Hi, am just looking for some help. Just bought a Linksys WPC11 v.4 card, tryign to get it to work on my TiBook500mhz, OS10.3.5. Have tried both the ioxperts and orangeware drivers but none work. Does anyone have any recommendations? It seems that both drivers are meant for atheros-based cards, which i don't really understand.
Is it possible that should I update my Airport software, the card will be compatible without a third-party driver?
thanks for help.

Take that card back, uninstall the drivers, and buy a WPC54G card instead. Plug that in and Apple's own driver will work just fine. Not only that, but you'll have Airport Extreme as a bonus.

Hey - Nick, are you saying snap off that black anteana, plug the WPC54G into the internal slot, and everything runs splendidly? I have an iBook 900 X.3.5. Been following these messages all over the net - and there area a dozen WPC54G's on British ebay at this very moment- set to go for around $50. Just need some confirmation. Some really intelligent thoughts everyone.

No. You cannot use a cardbus (or even a PCCard) device in the internal AirPort slot. That slot is proprietary, and the only thing that will work in it is an AirPort card.

A Broadcom-based CardBus card can, however, be inserted into the cardbus slot (or a PCI based card in a PCI slot) of a PowerBook and will work with Apple's AirPort Extreme driver.

I've just bought D-Link AirPlus Extreme G wireless router and cardbus adapter. i'm trying to get it work with my TiBook. is there anybody who got 3com wireless driver for osX?

is it possible to upgrade the regular airport driver in a iBook G3 to the Airport Extreme driver without problems?

I purchased my powerbook back before wireless was popular, so it came without an airport card. Not wanting to deal with the range and hassle of installing one, I purchased a Linksys WPC54G wireless adaptor, which according to many posts here, is supposed to be recognized automatically.

Here's the problem. As soon as I put the card in, the computer freezes. It doesn't matter if I'm in the middle of booting up, using an application, etc. It just freezes. Then if I pop the card out, everything goes back to normal.

Any ideas? It is a PowerBook 550MHz running Mac OS X (10.3.9) with all the latest updates installed.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated, thanks!
-Shrehh

I was just given an old PowerBook G3 series bronze keyboard (Lombard?), 400 GHZ processor speed, system upgrade to OS 10.3.9; newish hard disk (20 or so GB); 320 MB of RAM. I am a (former?) IBM-er, thoroughly unused to Macintosh. Well, I cannot live without my laptop being wireless. What do I do to make this one go wireless? I gather I can't just install a 802.11 b/g wireless card in the PCMCIA slot? Also, what do I need to do to be able to burn CDs? And lastly, is there some problem with being able to watch DVDs on the Lombard laptop? I heard something to that effect. I'm not a techie, but I do understand a few things. The most urgent problem now is to be able to be on a wireless network--the router is D-Link DI 524, 802.11 g/2.4 Ghz.

Thanks for any help you can give me. --Eloise

I have a G4 1.67 GHz Powerbook 15" with built in Airport Extreme. I'm frustrated with the poor range I get and purchased the only card that seems to work for people natively on a mac, the Buffalo WLI-CB-G54A. I'm running OS X Tiger, 10.4.2 with AirPort v. 4.2.

If I plug the card in while the machine is running I get an icon in the upper right with the option to safely eject it. I see no other options for using the card. I load up kismac and try using the card but it fails to see it. I've tried disabling the airport extensions by adding .DISABLED but then it seems like AirPort support in general is disabled.

If I plug the card in at startup it will kernal panic and freeze before the blue OS X screen. If I disable the airport extensions first I cant start the mac up with it plugged in and not get a kernal panic, but then it doesn't show up in the airport settings. (No airport hardware found) Is there a way to use this card with this setup? I even went so far as try to remove the original AirPort card but it seems to be built into the main board on this machine, as it's impossible to remove even after taking the case apart.

I have a G4 1.25 GHz "Tower" and I am using a Linksys WMP54G ver.2 Wireless G network adapter. It seems that whenever I upgrade to Tiger 10.4.2, it kills my wifi connection. It doesn't do that in 10.4.1. Could anybody that knows of this problem tell me how to resolve it? Preferably without having to purchase a new card. It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Phil

Hello, I have a Sawtooth AGP 1.4ghz tower and would like to upgrade to 802.11g. I bought the Linksys WMP54G pci wireless G card and installed it. I pulled out the old 802.11b card from the computer and restarted the computer. Ran the Airport Assistance for Graphite and Snow, and it was unable to find the new WMP54G card. Would some one please explain what I'm doing wrong and maybe help me get this accomplished.
Thanks in advance,
Felix

Hello, I have a Sawtooth AGP 1.4ghz tower and would like to upgrade to 802.11g. I bought the Linksys WMP54G pci wireless G card and installed it. I pulled out the old 802.11b card from the computer and restarted the computer. Ran the Airport Assistance for Graphite and Snow, and it was unable to find the new WMP54G card. Would some one please explain what I'm doing wrong and maybe help me get this accomplished.
Thanks in advance,
Felix