[jasonbw]

Apparently, MS is getting out of the wireless hardware business, and most stores are clearancing all -b and -g series cards and routers. I picked up a MN-730 pci card today ($40, about $10-20 cheaper than the Linksys-g card), hoping that being a broadcom based card, it would work with the standard airport drivers.

So far, nothing. i plugged it into a g4/500 tower at work and got zilch. i can't rule out the idea that i have a bad card, but in searching around i haven't been able to find anything on if this card is truly compatible or not. The only mention i found was in a table that says something like ' change vendor id in ap'.

anyone have any experience with these cards?

[Langdon]

Originally posted by jasonbw:
. I picked up a MN-730 pci card today ($40, about $10-20 cheaper than the Linksys-g card), hoping that being a broadcom based card, it would work with the standard airport drivers.

It is a broadcom chipset but I don't think its the same version of the one Apple uses. The MN720 and 730 both use broadcom chips but if you put it into an OSX machine with AP software v3 and its not seeing it then you aleady have your answer.

[jasonbw]

well, it took me hours to figure out exactly how the damn thing works, but using a varient on the airport extreme hack

http://www.osxhax.com/archives/000025.html

it decided to show up. in fact, i pulled the wired network cable just now and am posting this via the MS card.

the simple way is just to browse packages on the airport2.kext file, and edit the info.plist file.

the key is you need to find the line that says <string>pci14e4,4324</string>
the ioreg command tells me that the id number i need to use is actually 14e4,4325. it took me a while to get the read only attributes reset after messing with it (a disk utility run of repair permissions seemed to finally work).

i tryed simply adding another line, but thats when i got error messages on boot about the driver being bad and needing to reinstall (and that didn't work, installing airport 3.4.1 errored out because i had a newer version) so i figured i'd just edit the existing ones.

i have a feeling now that installing another compatible broadcom card will probably now not work, but now i shouldn't have to.

[jasonbw]

well, i'm not about to give up yet, but i found a problem. If my machine goes into a deep sleep, it won't wake up. its happened twice under the same circumstances so i'm pretty sure there is an issue here. So if anyone else wants to try, beware.