Fantastic, I'll be 1st person paying for that bounty.

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Do you know if Prism2 compatible wireless NIC's that work in the A1200/A600 could work in the G4 PowerBook PCMCIA slot, if support of that slot were added to MorphOS2.x?

I have an original Airport card inside my MDD dual 1.25GHz G4 PowerMac tower and would be one of the first to donate toward a bounty to get that wireless NIC working from MorphOS2.x, but I also have a 1.67GHz G4 PowerBook here waiting for the completion of which ever MorphOS2.x release that will support it. Since it has an Airport Extreme card inside of it and not the Prism2 compatible original Airport card, I would like to be able to use one of the Prism2 compatible wireless NIC's from my A1200 in my PowerBook some day. (unless of course you can also provide support for Airport Extreme cards and not just the original Prism2 compatible Airport cards)

Would the driver bounty that you are contemplating to provide support from within MorphOS2.x for the G4 PowerMac's Airport slot and original Airport cards also include providing support for the G4 PowerBook's PCMCIA slot, so when that port of MorphOS2.x is finished, we will be able to use Prism2 compatible wireless NIC's from our A1200's in our G4 PowerBooks?

I am sure that the MorphOS Development Team will provide you with a beta copy of MorphOS2.x that runs on the G4 PowerBook, if you take on this bounty to provide wireless support for it from within MorphOS2.x.

(lots of words, I hope I made my points clear in the above paragraphs)


[ Edited by amigadave on 2011/3/28 17:41 ]

Prism2 cards should work fine in PowerBooks' PCMCIA slot, but if I needed to write a card.resource for the slot myself, I'd have to check out how much work would be involved beforehand.

Airport Extreme support would be a far bigger project, and I wouldn't be interested in taking it on at the moment.

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AFAIK, there is no hardware driver within MorphOS2.x for the internal Airport slot in the G4 PowerMac towers, just as there will be no support for the internal Airport Extreme slot AND the external PCMCIA slot in the G4 PowerBooks when it is finally released.

This would require you to write support for the G4 PowerMac tower's Airport slot to complete your bounty and I thought that such a driver might be the same and could be used, or modified to be used to support the PCMCIA slot of the G4 PowerBook that hopefully will be supported by MorphOS2.x before the end of this year.

I bought the D-Link 520+ (hope the + doesn't make any difference!) revision B2 off ebay but it does not support WPA, only WEP (is this software or hardware?). Can support for WPA be included??

I actually couldn't get the card to work on MOS at all anyway (see third post in this thread) so I too would love an update which means this or newer wireless cards work with MOS on pegasos!!

Bifford

Well... does it make sense to start a bounty aimed at unreleased hardware (PowerBook) and without consulting with MorphOS Team first? I'm not even sure if the PCMCIA port actually can be used from userland without modifications in the boot.img first (altho I could be wrong here).

Personally I'd say a WPA2-less support makes 0 sense nowdays anyway - at least I wouldn't be able to use wireless anywhere that I usually do with my iPad or PowerBook under OSX. It only makes sense to have it if it comes with all current auth/encryption methods imho.

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I have a few doubts about that as well, as I mentioned in my previous post. The original idea was just to support the AirPort slot on currently supported hardware.

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I'm not sure that most people have the same necessity for WPA2 that you do. I use TKIP at home, and public networks tend to be unencrypted in my experience. In any case, WPA2 can be supported for PCI cards, but not for AirPort cards (it's a firmware limitation).

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Yes, the '+' makes a difference. It isn't a Prism-II card. Not even all revisions of the plain DWL520 are compatible.

I checked and AP Extreme is available as a normal pci device on a PowerMac MDD. Hard to say whether a PowerBook port will support PCMCIA at all though - at the moment it is blacklisted.

As for WPA2, it works just fine with AirPort cards, you just need to do the required bits in software.

No one is saying that the bounty has to be started for unreleased hardware, such as the PowerBook. I was just trying to inform ncafferkey that not only is the Airport slot in any MorphOS supported Mac not currently supported with a device driver, but I was hoping that if he can write such support that it could be used, or modified to be used on the G4 PowerBook's PCMCIA slot as well in the future, when MorphOS support for that model is released.

So, for now, the bounty would be only for writing Airport slot support for the G4 PowerMac's and making any needed modifications to the 68k Prism2 driver (if any) to allow the original Airport cards to work with MorphOS2.x, or if ncafferkey intends to do so, he could rewrite the 68k Amiga Prism2 driver to be PPC native.

If, as you indicate, the Airport slot support would require changes from within the boot.img part of MorphOS2.x, then I would hope that the MorphOS Dev. Team would work with ncafferkey to allow work on providing wireless networking for MorphOS2.x.

Personally, While using MorphOS2.x, I don't care if the wireless support is WEP, WPA1, or WPA2. I know that some people won't use wireless networking unless it is the most secure WPA2, but if that level of security is not possible at this time, or will delay the introduction of all wireless support for an additional year or more, please allow ncafferkey to give us WEP, or WPA1 wireless support now, for those of us who are willing to use less secure networking.

If work on this proposed bounty is successful, there is a chance that support for the G4 PowerBook's PCMCIA slot can also be provided to use Prism2 compatible wireless NIC's from MorphOS in the future release of PowerBook support. There is no harm in me hoping to one day have wireless networking support for the PowerBook, while also supporting the proposed bounty to provide Airport card and slot support for the G4 PowerMac, is there?

Blacklisted???

What does that mean?

If ncafferkey is willing to do the work for the Dev. Team, why wouldn't they allow him to do it? Not that he has offered to do anything on the PCMCIA slot, but I wonder what the Airport slot in the G4 PowerMac is listed as, if not a PCMCIA slot?

Why would the Dev. Team not want support for the regular Airport slot in the G4 PowerMac, if someone else is willing to do the work and it won't negatively effect the rest of the work the Dev. Team is doing?

There is already a PPC native MorphOS version of prism2.device.

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Do you have any references for that? My understanding is that the firmware doesn't allow encryption to be done in software.

> There is already a PPC native MorphOS version of prism2.device.

Yes, that's what I told him already some days ago:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7777&forum=11&post_id=82510#82510

But it seems he either overlooked or deliberately ignored it.

amigadave,

Blacklisted in this context just means the device is skipped in the mapping, to avoid weird issues.

Thanks for the clarification Fab. I hope the Dev. Team will think about this some more and decide to allow ncafferkey to work on supporting the Airport slot in the G4 PowerMac now and possibly the PCMCIA slot of the G4 PowerBook when MorphOS support is released for that model.

Having wireless networking support (even if it is not the most secure flavor of it) is a very desirable feature for any portable computer, as well as convenient for stationary computers as well.

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Well that's both stupid and annoying LOL. Fancy a simple + symbol making something non-compatible.

Sigh.

So what's the chance of this card being written into the list of cards that work....(I'll answer my own question and say next to no chance)? grr


Bifford

[ Edited by Bifford on 2011/3/30 8:39 ]

@ncafferkey

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Unless OSX uploads new firmware to the card (meaning we could that as well), how come WPA2 works fine on PowerBooks with Leopard?

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Yes, it was causing some funny problems and there was no need for it to work, so it's blacklisted atm meaning it isn't mapped.

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First of all, I was merely expressing my own thoughts about the issue (as in: wifi pointless w/o WPA2). Nobody is going to forbid anyone from doing anything here really. If we're to support AirPorts, we'll most likely support them all since they're pretty similar in all PPC Macs. Nothing prevents anyone from doing a 3rd party driver for PowerMacs or Mac mini though and we'll help anyone who wishes to do so.

> how come WPA2 works fine on PowerBooks with Leopard?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6042&forum=11&post_id=82523#82523

Maybe this is the reason?

> they're pretty similar in all PPC Macs.

They are? According to boot_wb's Wikipedia quote the original AirPort (all PowerMac G4 models except FW800) is mechanically PCMCIA whereas AirPort Extreme (PowerMac G4 FW800, PowerBook G4, eMac, Mac mini) is electrically Mini PCI.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=11&topic_id=6042&start=20
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6042&forum=11&start=16

Or is it that this wouldn't make much (any?) difference from MorphOS internals' point of view?

Well, if it's PCMCIA, it's likely blacklisted too :) I only had a chance to check the pciscan output on my MDD.

Thanks for correcting me about AirPort vs Ap Extreme Andreas.

[ Edited by jacadcaps on 2011/3/30 15:39 ]

> I only had a chance to check the pciscan output on my MDD.

So I take it your MDD is the FW800 variant, correct?

Indeed.

That explains some of the confusion. I was fairly certain that the Airport slot inside my G4 PowerMac was a PCMCIA slot and assumed that all, or most of the Airport slots in other G4 PowerMac towers were the same.

Since it is a PCMCIA slot, that gives me hope that if ncafferkey decides to accept a bounty to provide Airport support in MorphOS2.x, it will also work for the G4 PowerBook when MorphOS is released for that model (which is what I have been trying to say in this thread all along).

What do you say Neil, are you ready to take on such a bounty if we set one up? (it is Neil Cafferkey, isn't it?)

Also, I really don't see why jadacaps thinks that wireless support is useless, unless it has WPA2? But I am sure he knows more about all the versions of wireless security than I do, and he has his reasons. I hope he and the rest of the Team can see that many MorphOS users could and will take advantage of wireless networking, even if it only has WEP, or WPA1 security, instead of WPA2.

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Yes, that's me I don't have a G4 PowerMac, so I need to consider where I'm going to get one before I accept a bounty.