Recommendation: 300Mbps 2.4Ghz Wireless N PCIe Card

Hi all,

After reading the excellent recommendation by Tokay of the TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 here:
http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=52884
I remembered that we had a bunch of TP-Link products arrive at our offices the just other day. I dutifully rummaged through the box and found both a TP-LINK TL-WDN4800 (the same one covered by Tokay) and a TP-LINK TL-WN881ND (http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/?categoryid=240&model=TL-WN881ND).

So I rushed home, plugged in the TP-LINK TL-WN881ND to my Hackintosh, fired her up aaaaand nothing! Damn

A quick edit to the IO80211Family.kext and a restart later. Voila! Works likes a charm

Mac OS X Lion now recognizes it as a native AirPort Extreme card and AirDrop works like a bomb between my Hackintosh and Apple MacBook Pro.

Initial speeds seem very good and stable on both of my routers (G and N), although I must confess that I still need to do some more thorough tests.

For now though here's what I have (I'll post more details once I've done some more testing):
Card: TP-LINK TL-WN881ND
Chipset: Atheros 9287
Device ID: 168c,30a4
AirDrop: Working
Sleep/Wake: Still need to test

TP-Link 300Mbps Wireless N PCI Express.png

I had to manually inject the Device ID 168c,30a4 into the 'Info.plist' files inside IO80211Family.kext / Contents / Plugins / AirPortAtheros21.kext and AirPortAtheros40.kext respectively. (Thanks to baybaymac for that one!)
It's not quite an OOB solution, but with a 30 seconds tweak, a permissions repair and a restart it's close enough

For the less adventurous, I've attached an already modified version of the IO80211Family.kext for Lion 10.7.2 to try out.

IO80211Family.kext.zip

TP-Link seem to have quite a range of PCI and PCIe wireless adapters (even a MiniPCI) and it really would't surprise me much if most (if not all) of them use similar Mac OS friendly Atheros chipsets.
Either way, it's certainly worth investigating a bit further as the TP-Link range seems quite affordable and it would save all the hassles of finding MiniPCI adapters and mucking around on eBay trying to find those ever-elusive Apple AirPort cards and building your own WiFi solutions. Besides, it would be nice to see some more affordable Wireless Adapter options making their way into the Golden Builds threads

It would have personally saved me A LOT of cash, as I had just recently purchased a D-Link DWA-556 for it's OOB functionality.

Oh, well! We live and learn...

These kind of posts are why I love this forum. Great post i'll have to try it out, i've been looking for a good wireless card.

Hello,

First of all, thank you so much for sharing such information !

I retreived the ID from Windows, and opened the kext, and edited the Info.plist in IO80211Family.kext / Contents / Plugins / AirPortAtheros21.kext

however, I don't have the other kext AirPortAtheros40.kext as I am under SL

and the device is still not recognized.

What could I do in your opinion ?

Thanks in advance

daynatof said:

Hello,

First of all, thank you so much for sharing such information !

I retreived the ID from Windows, and opened the kext, and edited the Info.plist in IO80211Family.kext / Contents / Plugins / AirPortAtheros21.kext

however, I don't have the other kext AirPortAtheros40.kext as I am under SL

and the device is still not recognized.

What could I do in your opinion ?

Thanks in advance

Click to expand...

Thanks, daynatof!

Sorry, I completely forgot to check backwards compatibility with SL.
You could always just make a backup of your current IO80211Family.kext and try installing the one i attached to my original post (and edit it further if necessary). It's a Lion 10.7.2 kext, but it might just work.

I remember having a quite a lot of success using Lion ATI kexts on my SL installation, so i can't see why a Lion networking kext wouldn't work in your case.

I'll take a look this weekend see if i have any success on my old SL install and report back.

In the meantime shout if you have any success on from your side

j.

UPDATE:

Okay, i've had a look at my SL system and i can report back that you shouldn't bother trying my Lion 10.7.2 kext in SL. It doesn't work in SL and and the card still isn't recognized.

The good news is that you can edit the original SL 10.6.8 kext and have the card up and running pretty quickly.

Simply add the Device ID (168c,03a4) to the Info.plist in IO80211Family.kext / Contents / Plugins / AirPortAtheros.kext as well as the AirPortAtheros21.kext and AirPortAtheros9388.kext in that same folder.

SL doesn't seem to have an AirPortAtheros40.kext in its IO80211Family.kext, but as long as you inject the Dev ID into those other three, it seems happy. Yay!

I haven't tried any older versions of Snow Leopard, but i'm sure it should work for most of the later versions.

Here's an already edited version of the SL 10.6.8 kext for those lazy souls out there
IO80211Family.kext.zip

Woot!

Hello janitor,

Thanks a lot for your support !

I did a fresh reinstall and, magic, it worked oob !

But anyway I will keep your file, we never know

Thanks again

I am most likely going to order me a TL-WN881ND for my hackintosh, but was just wondering, would the kext you provided work for 10.7? I really don't want to update, if possible.

P.S. Nice find man, really helps me out a lot!

Edit: Just updated to the 10.7.3 Combo Update.

Hi, I have this PCI Express Wireless Card and I change the twice kext but Lion not recognized my ethernet card.

Do you know, what can be problem?

Thank you very much.

Im very very novice in this.

mundojetWeb said:

Hi, I have this PCI Express Wireless Card and I change the twice kext but Lion not recognized my ethernet card.

Do you know, what can be problem?

Thank you very much.

Im very very novice in this.

Click to expand...

Hey, dude!

Do you have "UseKernelCache=Yes" set in your Extras/org.chameleon.Boot.plist file?
Try setting it to "No" and and rebooting. Hopefully this will force the Kext to load and the card will be recognised

You may also have to add the WiFi card from the Network Control panel in System Preferences...

Good luck!

Thank's for posting this janitor. This was the last item on my get done list and after picking up a new SSD I also purchased one of these cards at the same time, used the kext in the first post and now (finally) have proper WiFi.

If anyone else is interested I'm running Lion 10.7.4 iMac 12,2 profile.

Hi janitor,

I ordered the card here in New Zealand from uk upon reading the success stories on this site. The card arrived, I fixed it in my pc and fired up. It natively saw the card ans says it on in network prerferences but it doesn't connect to the network. I have Airport Extreme 4th generation router. It doesn't seems to find my networks in the airport utility which is updated to latest version 5.4.2.

As per your instructions I have updated my device ID to 168c,0030 in all three places and used kept helper to install it but it doesn't seems to help!

If I try to manually configure the SSID it keeps asking me the password in the network pane but in the Airport utility it doesn't even show the networks. I have tried everything, even connected a second wireless router which my iPad and other devices can see but not this machine. Any ideas, please help, I am like going crazy without any luck!! Please help!

I am running 10.6.8.

UPDATE

I have tested the card on 10.7, 10.7.1. 10.7.2, 10.7.3 and finally 10.7.4. The card is natively picked up by all OSes but couldn't find a network for the sake of God. The card is active and on in network preferences but cant locate a network. I have even changed the router from Airport Extreme 4th generation to Netcomm but no success. Manually types in SSD's if you wan to propose but it doesn't wan to work. I need a genious to figure this out please....

Cheers



Cheers