Attn: Anyone Stuck With No Wireless and PCIe - Please READ

[the_uman]

Hi all,

 

Like many of you with a recent Acer, Compaq, Toshiba, etc laptop, I am stuck with no wireless support. In my case, I have an Atheros 5007EG (and an unsupported Marvel Yukon Ethernet-- so no love there either), but I believe that even if I replaced the PCIe card with a supported one, I would still have no wireless access.

 

Theories abound, but the current guess is that due to a hardware switch, the PCIe card may not be getting powered and hence is not seen by OS X.

 

I've poked around and our Linux kin seem to have solved the problem for many of the laptops. For example, http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi has a kernel module which can turn on the power switch. It supports a wide range of Acer laptops (see supported laptops). Similar solutions exist for Compaq and other hardware.

 

Looking at the Acer source code, it's not that complex. While I can grok basic Linux drivers, I have no knowledge of OS X drivers. But given this input, some driver-savvy soul might have enough to get going. Most driver writers write the drivers because they have the problematic hardware, or they are trying to provide something useful to the community (and here they'd want to solve a larger problem like getting a laptop to properly sleep), or they find coding a particular driver to be a challenging problem.

 

I don't think this PCIe/wireless problem fits any of those motivations, which is why it's remained unsolved for more than a year. So what I'd like to know is if any of you folk are interested in kicking in some cash to make this happen. I'm willing to do so. And if we get enough interested parties, perhaps we can get a bounty going that might fix the problem.

 

So if you're interested in kicking in some cash, please respond to this thread. It's not necessary to state how much-- we can sort that out once we have a headcount.

 

Also, if any of the driver writers happen to read this, feel free to post if you are interested in doing the work. If so, please post how much cash it would take to interest you.

 

If we get a decent headcount (also assuming that none of this is against insanelymac rules ), I'll post a formal note in the drivers forum.