10.4: A fix for Motorola wireless cards under 10.4.2

Oct 13, '05 06:03:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintI have a Dual PowerMac G4; it's from before the time of AirPort Extreme Card slots. It does has an AirPort slot, but only for wireless-b AirPort cards ... which you can no longer get from Apple, and other place charge a premium. Macwireless.com does have WiFi-G card that work for this unit, but once again, they charge a premium ($150 was the cheapest I found).

But you can use a cheap Motorola card, WPC1810G, which I found for 35$ at a local Radio Shack on clearance. I found that this card was confirmed to work based off a website I found using google.com. Unfortunately, I lost the reference to that site; sorry. Sadly, this card stops working once you upgrade Tiger to 10.4.2. There is an update to the AirPort kernel extensions, from version 3.5 to 4.0. I don't know if Apple did it on purpose, or just doesn't care to make sure it doesn't break third-party wireless cards. But this update does.

Since this update is mandatory if you want all the other fixes, and you can't choose not to install just the AirPort update, you can't roll-back (easily). So I personally had reinstall Tiger from scratch to undo the changes.

But this time, I backed up the following files.

Then I updated my machine again, and again AirPort broke. So I copied the files I saved back into /System -> Library -> Extensions, ran Disk Utility and repaired permissions, then restarted my Mac, and I was back online.

I've read that you can make all types of changes inside the kext bundles to make third party cards work. But that's not for me; I don't know enough about it. This works, and if you need (want) a wifi-G card in an older Mac, this is the cheapest method.

[robg adds: I obviously haven't tested this one, and I cannot really recommend it as a good solution -- any time you have to downgrade a piece of the OS to get something working, you don't really know what else you may be putting at risk. For example, perhaps there were security patches in the newer version of the AirPort kext. With that said, this approach seems to work, based not only on this post, but some work with Google to see what others have done.]

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