wireless woes
In the future I shall try to be less melodramatic. My PowerBook lacks an AirPort card at all; I confirmed that it was supposed to have one so now one’s on order and I may get it soon. In the meantime I’ve been screwing around with various third-party wireless drivers. There is one called WirelessDriver (imaginative, I know) that is free as in speech and beer, and two others that are neither but support 802.11a/g cards. The pay drivers are fairly inexpensive ($15) and the one I liked actually worked out of the box on my Proxim 802.11abg combo.
The problem I have with this is that both Linux and FreeBSD support most Atheros/Intel/etc. 802.11a/g chipsets (but less so Broadcom), and darn near all 802.11b ones. There’s no real reason why my Senao Prism2.5 card should not Just Work(tm) in OS X. Or why I should have to resort to a pay driver or fairly flaky free one to get support. Granted, it’s a small market - iBooks can’t take PCMCIA cards anyway and OS X supports Airport natively - but it can’t be that hard to port an existing driver. So, that means I’m thinking about trying it. I did at one point have a bit of a replacement keyboard driver working to an extent in OS X. That was 10.1, though.