G'day all,

Here's a solution that took me a week to develop. I hope it's useful to
someone ...

This may work with other unsupported USB Wireless Networking devices of
the same chipset - do some research!

Anyway, a cheaper solution than buying an airport card ... ;)

Mikey Mike (a.k.a. miklos)

From the read me:

Here is (hopefully) a solution for you (and the Mac community) on how to
use a Netgear MA 101 USB Wireless Network unit with OS X 10.3.9.

Why me?:

The short story: my wife was sick of the lounge room looking like geek
city, so she made me buy her an G4 iBook (lovely!), and relegated me and
my slot loading G3 iMac to the other end of the house.

The story so far:

Don't you love eBay? The iBook came with (amongst other things) an
Airport Extreme card, so this gave me the opportunity to 'have a fiddle'.

In the past, I have run a long blue ethernet cable from the front to
back of our home, but "she who must be obeyed" deemed it ugly and
unsafe. Occupational Health and Safety issues. That type of thing ...

I took this as a cue to spend a little more money, so I went back to
eBay and found a Netgear Wireless router (works without problems with
the iBook), and - from the same seller (saving postage!) - a Netgear MA
101 USB Wireless Network adapter.

Here's how I got it working:

Before I placed a bid, I did a Google and found Thomas McQuitty's
"Challenge - Get USB Wireless Devices (802.11b) working."

http://www.mcquitty.net/archives/200....html#comments.

With his wonderful work, I figured it could be done - so I bid and won
both bits of kit for around AUS$80. Cheap at half the price.

After bidding and winning, I noticed that his instructions would only
work with a particular model.
I hoped I would get a Revision B - and I did (phew!).

OS X Hax also have reported on Thomas' work , and from the comments
associated with their coverage , it seems there have been some changes
since Mr McQuitty started hacking in 2003.

http://www.kfu.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=36

What you will need:

A USB equipped Macintosh running OS X - I know this works with 10.3.9 -
YMMV ...
A Wireless base station of some kind (mine's a Netgear MR814 v2, but any
one should do ...)
A Netgear MA 101 USB Wireless Network adapter (Revision B - make sure
you ask!)
A bit of Time and Patience

Go have a look at Thomas' brilliant website - it contains links to the
Belkin download page for the OS X Drivers (regardless of what flavour of
OS X you are running, you need the 10.1 version), and his own patched
driver package. You'll need these - download them now. It's OK - I'll
wait ...

http://web.belkin.com/support/downlo...download=827&l
ang=1
http://www.mcquitty.net/files/F5D6050Driver.pkg.sit

.... Got them? Good. You'll also need a modified version of the
application that modifies the settings.

http://www.mcquitty.net/files/NetgearNIC.sit

The Simple Instructions:

1) Run the Belkin Installer for the Belkin F5D6050 adapter. Restart.

No magic yet. Don't Panic.

2) Run Thomas' marvellously patched F5D6050Driver package. Restart.

The unit could/should be working (check Networking in System
Preferences),
but the "Belkin Wireless LAN Configuration" app won't recognise it,
so there's one more step ...

3) Decompress "Wireless LAN Configuration.app.sit".

Move the application to your Applications or Utilities Folder.

Double click on it!

You should now be able to switch/find networks, and configure the device
for WEP encryption.

Limitations:

Don't ask me about OS X 10.4. There's no Tiger in my tank. Maybe one day
.... in the meantime, Konfabulator will just have to do ...

All of the above should work, but you may see an Apple crash report
whenever you apply changes in the "Wireless LAN Configuration" app. It
still works, so don't let it worry you.

A solution is to install a modified copy of the info.plist that comes
with the 10.3 installer. I've included a copy, but it's a bit tricky to
install: you have to find the F5D6050.kext in
YourHardDrive:System:Library:Extensions, then open it up, then copy it
over (you'll have to authenticate this), then change its
owner/permissions/etc to match all the other files in there.

If that sounds like too much of a pain in the botty-bot, just put up
with the app sending an occasional crash report.

DIY:

Thomas' excellent instructions gave me a clue on how to get the app
working, so 99% of the kudos goes to him.

He modified the info.plist that his modified driver package installs
(changing the Product ID from 40962 to 16642, and the Vendor ID from
3420 to 2148). I figured the app must need to have similar changes made.

Now, I'm not the pimple on a programmer's bottom, but I used HexEdit
(freeware - do a Google) to make similar changes to the Belkin supplied
app.

For the technically inclined, I did a hex search for A002 (that's 40962
in decimal), and changed it to 4102 (16642 decimal). Similarly, 0D5C
became 0864.

If that read like "Blah blah, blah blah blah ...", then now you know why
I've put it at the end of this document.