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Realtek's Wireless Driver Drives Thoughts of an Apple Netbook

Posted by timothy on from the can't-get-there-from-here-in-cupertino dept.

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."

19 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing in the EULA by actionbastard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Nothing in the EULA by nacturation · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the bigger thing that component manufacturers are worried about is that Steve Jobs will call up MSI and say "Hey, we'd like to contract with you to develop a Mac netbook based on the Wind to run OS X. Oh, and by the way... don't use any RealTek chips in it."

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    2. Re:Nothing in the EULA by yttrstein · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And not only that, but this is one of the reasons that Darwin was open sourced in the first place. My company has done the odd bit of consulting here and there with other entities that provide all sorts of weird hardware drivers for OS X, and they don't call Apple and ask them for one first.

      Because they don't have to. That's part of what Darwin is for. This is FUD, and should be treated as such.

    3. Re:Nothing in the EULA by Albanach · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's not like Macs don't come with expansion card slots (PCI or ExpressCard) that could take a WiFi card with a RealTek chip

      Actually the MacBook doesn't have an expansion slot - that's what caused the big hoo-ha about the lack of Firewire support, there's no way to add it in later.

      For the other Macs you're absolutely right - especially if they had a wireless N driver as I could conceive of some Mac users upgrading toa third party card to provide wireless N functionality.

    4. Re:Nothing in the EULA by nacturation · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think the bigger thing that component manufacturers are worried about is that Steve Jobs will call up MSI and say "Hey, we'd like to contract with you to develop a Mac netbook based on the Wind to run OS X. Oh, and by the way... don't use any RealTek chips in it."

      I am not a lawyer but that sounds like tortious endangerment of interstate commerce to me.

      Quite right, you're not. If you're Apple and you approach a manufacturer, nothing prevents you from stating that you don't want to have a particular supplier's products in your custom built product. Now if Apple were to tell MSI that to do business with Apple, they would have to completely drop RealTek as a supplier from all of MSI's products then you might have a point.

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    5. Re:Nothing in the EULA by uglyduckling · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sorry, are you really claiming here that Apple left the firewire port out for the sake of aesthetics and/or to protect us from the tyranny of a four-pin port?! It was left out as a profit-maximising measure because they know that the MacBook is incredibly popular with musicians and they want to force people who rely on FireWire (i.e. anyone who wants to get multi-channel audio into a laptop at a decent sample/bitrate) into buying the MacBook Pro. Simple as that.

    6. Re:Nothing in the EULA by code4fun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      One point about RealTek's driver, it looks like a plain Ethernet device from OS X. From what I understand, you need a special program to set the wireless settings. That is, you can't use existing wireless configuration. It also doesn't work as smoothly as Airport, either. What others have done on the MSI Wind is buy a wireless card off eBay that uses the same chipset Apple uses. This way, OS X sees it as an Airport device.

      I'm more interested in Apple coming out with a netbook based on the ARM processor that will give me a day's worth of use instead of 4-5 hours on the current netbooks. In addition, I would like to be able to use the device as a tablet so I can jot things down and read PDF documents. Now, that's a netbook! Build it and I will buy.

  2. About time by dread · · Score: 5, Funny

    Suddenly I think I will play with the Wind tonight.

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  3. darwin by leuk_he · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Doesn't OSX run on Darwin, An open source bsd based OS? Why would you not be allowed to create drivers for darwin?

    1. Re:darwin by falcon5768 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The story is bunk. Its making a lot of assumptions due to lack of knowledge on just why a Hackintosh is illegal, and how this is not.

      Nothing prevents ANY company from making drivers that will run in OS X. The ONLY prevention is from someone putting OS X on a non-apple machine due to the licensing agreement.

      So Dell, HP, MSI any of them can make drivers for their machines that work in OS X, they just cant put OS X ON their machines nor inform you how to do it.

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  4. Non-Story by Benanov · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  5. On the legal issue by Spad · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:On the legal issue by olddotter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Which is probably as good as saying Realtek has no such agreement with Apple.

      I don't think Apple will produce a traditional net book. Look for something like a larger iPhone/Ipod Touch or a 12" Mac Book Air (that is so light weight you can tie a string to it and use it for a kite).

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  6. PCI Cards et al. by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  7. OMG someone is writing drivers for Mac OS X?! by Henriok · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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..

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  8. Re:Since OS X is based on Darwin by db32 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Because when you think about it that way it doesn't make for sensationalist flamebait articles on slashdot. Duh.

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  9. Re:AIr Book is a netbook in everything but price by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    We can barely understand your posts the incoherent ones.

  10. Re:What is a netbook? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/

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  11. four-pin port tyranny by commodoresloat · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!!!