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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."

5 of 136 comments (clear)

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

    Suddenly I think I will play with the Wind tonight.

    --
    I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
  2. 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.

      --

      "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."

  3. 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.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  4. 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.