4

I purchased an old Mac Pro to use as a home server. It has no WiFi card.

I have a generic Wireless N USB dongle. I got it a long time ago and it's not branded. Windows installs the drivers automatically so I never put much thought into it.

System report in OSX tells me the below...

802.11n WLAN Adapter:

  Product ID:   0x8176
  Vendor ID:    0x0bda  (Realtek Semiconductor Corp.)
  Version:  2.00
  Serial Number:    00e04c000001
  Speed:    Up to 480 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer: 802.11n WLAN Adapter
  Location ID:  0xfd500000 / 4
  Current Available (mA):   500
  Current Required (mA):    500

What chances do I have of getting it running? It's not showing as a network in the Network settings.

Edit:

I found the driver disk and it has drivers up to 10.6. Also I found a post here which seems to say that it has worked on Lion. Copied below...

I use an Realtek based noname USB WIFI Stick:

802.11n WLAN Adapter:

BSD-Name: en1
Produkt-ID: 0x8176 (RTL8188CUS chip)
Hersteller-ID: 0x0bda (Realtek Semiconductor Corp.)
Version: 2,00
Seriennummer: 00e04c000001
Geschwindigkeit: Bis zu 480 MBit/s
Hersteller: Realtek

The realtek drivers (comes with an Wifi Util that runs on startup) works with Lion 64 Bit 10.7.2 C40.
Realtec supports OS X good (fast updates).
square_eyes
  • 320
  • Its very unlikely you will get it to work since you don't have a OS X driver for it. – Ramhound Dec 03 '14 at 23:52
  • Could I try a few other OSX realtek drivers? Or am I wasting my time? – square_eyes Dec 03 '14 at 23:58
  • Searching Realtek's Downloads Search shows there isn't anything newer than 10.8 supported. At the very least (and if the driver functioned) it would require you disable kext signature verification at boot time. –  Dec 04 '14 at 01:28
  • OK doesn't look good then. For what it's worth I actually just found the driver disk in a box. It looks like it's only got windows drivers though. Oh no, it's got some Mac files in here CardbusPCIWireless-10.3,10.4, 10.5 and 10.6. – square_eyes Dec 04 '14 at 01:31

1 Answers1

4

OK I got it to work. I Googled RTL8188CUS (from the post I found above) the name of the chip and came to a driver from 2011 which passed a virus scan, installed, rebooted and worked fine!

Edit: Anyone else reading this, you might find the Wifi doesn't work until the utility loads after you log in. I found that this helped.

square_eyes
  • 320
  • There's a 2.01 driver on the the Realtek sight. I wouldn't have expected any of these to be signed, predating Mavericks. Have you disabled kext signing verification? –  Dec 04 '14 at 02:04
  • ftp://WebUser:Lc9FuH5r@23.251.207.30/cn/wlan/Wlan_11n_USB_MacOS10.8_Driver_UI_2.0.1.zip OS X 10.8 driver version 2.0.1. –  Dec 04 '14 at 02:10
  • By that you mean Allow apps downloaded from: section in Security and Privacy - Set to Anywhere? – square_eyes Dec 04 '14 at 03:06
  • No. You have an osx-yosemite tag. Yosemite by default checks signatures of kext bundles, and refuses to load kexts that aren't signed. It can be turned off with a boot argument. –  Dec 04 '14 at 03:37
  • To my knowledge I never did that. It's OSX 10.10.1. Is there a check I can do to see if I inadvertently set that to off at some other point? I'm comfortable in Terminal. – square_eyes Dec 04 '14 at 03:50
  • There's the command line command in a terminal nvram boot-args. If it returns something along the lines of 'nvram: Error getting variable - 'boot-args'' then kext signing checking hasn't been disabled. If it returns something containing 'kext-dev-mode=1' kext signing checking has been disabled. –  Dec 04 '14 at 08:29
  • 1
    It turns out there's at least one Realtek kext signed by InsanelyMac. –  Dec 04 '14 at 09:02
  • Strange that this driver you posted, and I'm guessing the one I found, doesn't connect the Wifi dongle until you have logged in and the utility loads. I don't suppose you know a way around that? I guess I could have it auto log in, but that's not very secure. – square_eyes Dec 05 '14 at 11:54
  • I found this which I will try http://lifehacker.com/5779922/make-os-x-load-your-desktop-before-you-log-in – square_eyes Dec 05 '14 at 11:56