Brian wrote:
For popular chipsets with opensource support, aren't there usually OS X drivers that work fine?
Not that I've seen actually, and I did look.
For example, Belkin has the PC Card F5D6010 and no drivers, but it's really a common manufacturer, relabeled as Belkin ( I forget which but google will say) , and OS X drviers are available. I just researched this for a friend with a OS X laptop and this Belkin card, but haven't heard about how the driver install went yet (or if you access thru Airport or other).
Hmmm, I don't see that card listed anywhere. There is a F5D6010, which appears to be a Prism2 chipset. Sure, there are drivers for Linux and the *BSD's under an open source licence, but I don't see anything for Mac OS 10 that is free.
I found a great list of OS 10 compatible WiFi cards: http://home.earthlink.net/~metaphyzx/Wireless.htm
It's fairly current. This is what I used to decide which card I got for my machine.
I don't have any airport-using equipment so I've never figured out how limiting that really is. My G4 is "airport ready" but I see no reason to pay Apple extra just for having their weird slot populated, when I know I can get a PCI solution.
Agreed fully. When I get my G5, I'm specifically looking for a machine that I can use the card I now have in it. So, the mini is right out. :-/
Don't get me started on the Airport base station, with a bog-standard PCCard inside. sheesh.
A lot of AP's and 'routers' are like that actually. The first-gen Airports used Orinoco silver and gold cards. My Orinoco BG-2000 has a gold card in it as well.
So no, if you research a little and don't mind losing a PCI slot, cheaper solutions are around.
I didn't disagree that there were other solutions available, I was stating that the ability to find a working solution that wasn't Apple branded was limited, and that one can't just pick up any random card and use it, no matter how common the chipset used is. Heck, OS 10 doesn't support anything natively except for Broadcom-based cards (which there are a goodish amount).
Personally, I'd rather go for something that is natively supported vs adding in a hacked or third-party driver.
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