WaveLAN Wireless LAN Driver for OS X

Open-source drivers for Lucent’s wireless LAN cards were posted yesterday. Great news for PowerBook users that do not have an Airport card slot.

Open-source drivers for Lucent’s wireless LAN cards were posted yesterday. Great news for PowerBook users that do not have an Airport card slot.

Installation:

Install these only under OS X 10.0.4 (I have not tried any other versions). These work for me on a Lombard with a WaveLAN silver card, I cannot speak for any other machines/cards.

You must be root to install this (or use sudo). i.e. in the terminal type appropriately edited (username, path_to_files) versions of the following commands to install the kext files. The first thing to do is backup your current version of IOPCCardFamily.kext

sudo cp -r /System/Library/Extensions/IOPCCardFamily.kext
~username/Documents

then copy the new kext files to the Extensions folder

sudo cp -r /path_to_files/WavelanDriver/AirportDriver.kext
/System/Library/Extensions
sudo cp -r /path_to_files/WavelanDriver/IOPCCardFamily.kext
/System/Library/Extensions

the files should be owned by root in the group wheel and have permissions set to drwxr-xr-x (755)

reboot with your wavelan card in your pcmcia slot, login, open system preferences and select the ethernet adaptor option (en1). I use DHCP with my Airport BS and it works fine. Hope you have the same experiences as me and are happily connected back to your wireless connection. I for one have waited breathlessly for this and can now switch to OS X full time.

Enjoy!

Y