[Wirelessdriver-support] Airport Extreme / 802.11g

[Nick S. <ns...@qu...>]

This perhaps isn't the absolutely correct place to ask, but I couldn't 
really think of a better audience.

I have a TiBook, so there's no hope of shoehorning the new Airport 
Extreme mini PCI device in, but I had a thought and wanted to throw it 
up for folks to kick around.

I bought a Linksys WPC54G. When I stick it in the TiBook, I see it in 
ioreg as a IOCardBusDevice.... But it looks a lot like a PCI device. 
This is sensible, since so far as I am aware, Cardbus was designed to 
look from a driver perspective more like PCI than PCCard.

Well, Airport Extreme is a miniPCI device, which makes it look 
*exactly* like PCI.

I have already speculated that if you took a Linksys WMP11 and replaced 
its 802.11b module with an Apple Airport Extreme module that you'd be 
able to use Apple's own drivers to get desktop macs (with PCI slots) 
able to use Airport Extreme.

But I believe we can go further. If we start with a presumption that 
everyone's using the Prism GT chipset for 802.11g, I suspect that 
merely by editing the Airport Extreme driver's Info.plist file and 
adding entries for the stuff that kicks back from ioreg about the 
WPC54G that Apple's own driver will be able to deal with this card, at 
least in some limited way.

This immediately tosses up some question marks: Apple's own airport tab 
in the network system prefs probably doesn't understand hot-swappable 
hardware (meaning you may need to leave the card in from power-up), and 
it may not understand having both an Apple Airport module and an 
Airport Extreme card in the same machine at the same time (meaning you 
may need to disable the Airport module somehow). All of these questions 
remain unanswered mainly because no one has Apple's Airport Extreme 
driver yet (perhaps coming soon in 10.2.4?).

What Apple really ought to do is provide an SDK and/or some other 
driver specification so that 3rd parties could hook into Apple's 
Airport network control panel, but I suspect they would rather folks 
buy new powerbooks instead. :-/

Any thoughts?