no airport

[jvdbossc]

Hi,

I picked up a 17 inch powerbook g4. It did not boot normal mac os9.2 but I picked up the cd image for unsupported machines from this forum.

However, airport is not in the tcp/ip pane. In mac os X 10.5 there was an airport card.

Any ideas?

thanks,

[GaryN]

Simple: There was no Airport in the OS9 era. Your Airport card will only work in OSX.
If you must have wireless OS9, you'll have to add external Wi-Fi - either PMCIA (the best because it sits inside the slot, but really hard to find) or USB.

Sux, but it is what it is…

[ELN]

Go easy!

Your machine has an "AirPort Extreme" card (802.11g). That will not work with OS 9. Sorry. :/

But older machines with plain "AirPort" cards (802.11b, different connector) do support WiFi (without WPA) in OS 9.

[MacOS Plus]

  I just remembered something I always wanted to know but could never trace reliable information for.  I'm going to post it here since it's relevant:

  I've read that the original AirPort cards were PCMCIA with some of the pins mixed around so it couldn't work in a normal PCMCIA slot nor other cards in the AirPort slot.  Does anyone know what the difference in the pinouts actually was?  If I could ever find this out I would be interested in taking some scrap parts and wiring up an in-line adapter to allow such conversions.  It might open up the possibility of alternative use of the AirPort slot in the otherwise expansion-crippled G4 Cube, as one practical example.

  On another related note, and I did a lot of research into this theory, were the first AirPort Extreme cards based on Mini-PCI, just with a non-standard connector?  There was a reduced-pin-count variant in the specification that seems to match up with the pin-count of the AP Extreme.  My thought was that the AP Extreme slot on a motherboard could possibly be re-purposed for some other Mini-PCI device instead.  Hackable expansion for iBooks and Mac Mini's, anyone?  Maybe I'm dreaming too much...

[GaryN]

Your machine has an "AirPort Extreme" card (802.11g). That will not work with OS 9. Sorry. :/
But older machines with plain "AirPort" cards (802.11b, different connector) do support WiFi (without WPA) in OS 9.

And there's where it all goes to hell, unfortunately. The original Airport card will NOT fit in your 2003-era MB Pro.
Even if you pull together some kind of bridge, adapters or whatever, the best you'll get is 802.11b in OS9.
So you have to ask yourself…"Do I feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?" "Is this actually worth it, or should I just use a wire?"