I called MacMall yesterday wondering if I they could recommend a wi-fi Cardbus card for my Wall Street since I don't want to depend on a 3rd party card's software to get it to work when I'm out of town.
They told me I'd need OS X. True?
The sheer amount of FUD out there about these things is astounding.
If you want to use a CardBus card, you'll need OS X (as no Wireless (a, b, or g) CardBus cards exist with drivers for OS 9, AFAIK). There are plenty of non-3rd party solutions remaining for OS 9, however.
MacWireless makes a nice card that they support with drivers in OS 9. The card will work on anything from a 190 up.
Farallon (now Proxim) makes the SkyLINE which also works in OS 9 on a 190 or better.
Lucent/ORiNOCO/Avaya/Agere/whoevertheyaretoday (now actually owned by Proxim - the same guys that bought Farallon) make the "silver" and "gold" series of cards (sometimes called WaveLAN and sometimes called ORiNOCO). These cards have been cloned a thousand times by people from Dell to IBM to Sony to Apple. Apple's card is the AirPort card, but it will NOT work in a Wallstreet. It only works in the internal AirPort slots of later Macs. The OEM cards (called WaveLAN or ORiNOCO) will work with Apple's AirPort drivers in OS 9 and appear to the Mac as though they are genuine AirPort cards. Additionally, ANY of the 3rd party WaveLAN-chipset cards (except the AirPort card) will work with the ORiNOCO 7.2 drivers under OS 9.
All WaveLAN chipset-based cards require 3rd party OS X drivers.
I run a bunch of WaveLAN-based cards in my Macs. I've got a Sony PCWA-C150S card with a nice stubby antenna, 2 ORiNOCO Silvers, and 2 WaveLAN silvers. I've also got a SkyLINE 2 Mb card that I haven't set up yet. It'll get stuck in one of my 5300s at some point, I'm sure. My two Wallstreets and my Pismo all run Apple's AirPort software. When I insert the ORiNOCO or WaveLAN cards, the cards appears on the desktop as "AirPort PC Card" and the AirPort software "just works." I should point out that AirPort does not recognize 3rd party WaveLAN cards like the IBM High Rate Wireless PC Card or the Dell TrueMobile 1150. On my 5300s, AirPort isn't supported, so I run the ORiNOCO drivers. The ORiNOCO 7.2 drivers recognize ALL WaveLAN based cards as being "ORiNOCO" cards.
The AirPort card is a special card with something funny going on. It's actually CardBus, but it doesn't work in CardBus slots. I've read that Apple switched a few pins around so that it will not work in standard CardBus slots but only in the AirPort slot. FWIW, WaveLAN cards do work as AirPort cards when installed internally.
Peace, Drew
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