Thursday 24 April 2008

Using D-Link DWL-G630 AirPlus G with Mac OS X

After having failed to get this wireless LAN PC card under windows (98SE crashes, 2000 worked for a while but has given up now) I thought I'd give it a go under OS X.  There are no OS X drivers on the D-Link site so it seemed like an effort doomed to failure but it is actually remarkably simple.  A discussion on the Apple support site suggests that Ralink drivers may work.  From Ralink's Mac drivers page, download and install the RT28xx driver (v1.0.0.0a dated 3-Dec-2007 for OS X 10.3, 10.4 or 10.5 as I write this).  

The RT61 v1.0.4.0 / RT2500 v1.3.0.0 driver also appears to work OK. There is a problem with both of these drivers: when the Mac goes to sleep with the network card enables it will not wake up again and requires a ctrl-apple-power to bring it back to life.  If you are looking to buy a wireless LAN card, you're probably better off with something else but if it's all you have this is not too much of an inconvenience.


The driver install also installs the snappily named WirelessUtilityCardbusPCI which has a rather strange user interface.  You can connect from the 'Site Survey' tab, but next time you start it will have forgotten your WEP passkey.   It's better therefore to set up a profile, which is most easily done from the 'Site Survey' tab with the 'add profile' button as you don't have to enter all your settings.  It seems that settings are not saved when the utility is exited as part of OS X shutdown so when you've got it working quit the wireless utility to save your settings.  A nice touch is that quitting the wireless utility keeps the wireless connection open.


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