I'm a Mac user, which means I'm used to everything just...well...working when I turn it on. Unfortunately, that's not the case for OS X and an old Lucent WaveLAN card on a PowerBook G3 (bronze keyboard), which is what I had to work with today. We gave Lane my mother's old PowerBook for Christmas, and after installing 256MB of memory in it today (it only had 64MB), I upgraded it to OS X (Panther)...forgetting that Apple doesn't support the WaveLAN card, and that the drivers I was using don't work under OS X.
My first attempt at solving the problem was an open source driver available on SourceForge, with the creative name of "WirelessDriver." But after multiple attempts at installing, it became clear that it wasn't going to work. The problems I encountered were described on the forums, but there were no clear answers (other than an oblique reference to needing to do some "kext-fu" -- apparently in reference to problems with kext files).
After fighting with it for a while, I followed another link to musox.com, which in turn pointed me to the not open source and not free IOxperts 802.11b Driver for Mac OS X. Worked on the first try, so I cheerfully ponied up the $19.95 before the 30 minute trial period ended.
Moral of the story? Not sure there is one. But I do have one very happy 9-year-old, who's now happily IM'ing and emailing everyone he knows on his very own laptop.
