102 replies to this topic

[CleverCoder]

Just ran circles around not being able to save my profile. Ultimately, my solution was to add myself to the permissions for the "/Library/Preferences" folder with read/write access. Upon launch of the RealTek utility, I created a profile and it saved the settings. All was well. Not sure what changed between SL and Lion, but this works now.

[Shaun Tiberius Woods]

Michael Tyson, on 25 September 2011 - 04:51 PM, said:

As anarkhos suggested, running a virtual machine to operate the device is a pretty good option.

It took me two days to figure out all the details (like setting up routing both from the VM, and from the mac itself for internet sharing), but I got there, and I've found two things:

• No more booting in 32 bit, no more crashes, no more constant reboots and I can sleep my mac
  
• I get a vastly stronger and more stable signal, and a faster throughput, to my great surprise

It turns out the Mac driver isn't just buggy, it actually doesn't seem to drive the device to its full potential. I'm getting great signal strength now, via the VM (using the Windows drivers via ndiswrapper - the native Linux drivers are awful too).

I wrote up step-by-step instructions on how to make it happen (using the free VirtualBox VM software, and the very small-form-factor Microcore Linux distribution) at http://atastypixel.c...e-for-your-mac/ - I made a VM appliance you can download and boot straight away, and an easy-to-install OS X service to set up internet sharing for other computers on the network.

Dude, you are a ledge! Well done lar!

[blickblocks]

First post here on insanelymac! Thanks for the tip about changing permissions on Library and Preferences, works great.

As Michael Tyson had said, the OSX driver doesn't use the full power of the RTL8187l. The reason why is a region-locking issue. In the US the TX power is limited to 27dB. In other regions, such as Bolivia, you can use the full 30dB power.

When I run Backtrack Linux (in Virtualbox) I've been able to change the region and TX power setting:

Quote

iw reg set BO
iwconfig wlan0 txpower30

I originally found this on this blog:

http://store.rokland...backtrack-5-bt5

In Mac OSX there is no iwconfig command and ifconfig doesn't allow for the commands to change the region and power setting as far as I know. Anybody have any ideas?