[MLB-WIRELESS] Apple 1400 + Wireless card + ethernet card

[clae at tpg.com.au]

Hi,

I'm looking to make some purchases in the next couple of days, so I'm 
hoping somebody on one of these lists can give me some definitive 
advice.  Please excuse me if any of this information seems redundant, 
I am sending it out to different lists.

I am thinking of using an Apple Powerbook 1400 laptop as a wireless 
base station.  This is a 166 mHz 603e PowerPC based laptop, which can 
run MacOS 9.1 and PPC Linux.  It has a 16-bit PCMCIA slot, which will 
take two Type-II or one Type-III cards.  It does NOT have built-in 
ethernet, so one of the card slots would be taken up for this.  The 
one I am looking at has 40 meg of ram.

Basically I want to install a third-party 802.11b wireless networking 
card into it, and connect it via wired ethernet to my G3 desktop 
machine (pre-Airport model).  So I am looking for recommendations on 
an 802.11b card which can be hacked to take an external antenna, 
without physically clashing with the ethernet card.  

The card would need a reasonable power rating, 100mW would be nice, 
but 30 would do, and a decent recieve sensitivity.  One that can do 
diversity antennas would be nice (making sense so far?)   I believe 
that the Apple Airport software can be used with third-party cards, 
but it would be good to find a card that also has linux/bsd drivers.  
It also needs to be capable of operating both as a client and a base 
station (ad-hoc mode?  please excuse terminological inadequacy), as 
well as being able to speak to non-apple machines, and those running 
128 bit WEP.

Actually, if I can do what I need entirely within the MacOS, I will 
probably put off learning linux for a while longer :)

FYI I quote from this bulletin board:  <http://www.macworld.com/cgi-
bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=12&t=001338>

"...Orinoco (Lucent) says the Orinoco Gold card is the same card as 
the Apple Airport card...it's true...I opened my G4's case ... 
removed the Airport card, and the Orinoco Gold card slid right in and 
works with the Airport drivers..."

Any advice you can give me about this system, any issues either 
software or hardware based I might run into, would be much 
appreciated.  I would especially like to hear from anyone who is 
using a 1400 or lesser Apple laptop for this purpose - for example a 
520.  I can pick up this laptop for little more than the cost of a 
PCI-PCMCIA adapter for my desktop, as it has a slightly wonky screen.

If you believe your reply would be off-topic for this list, please 
reply to me direct  - clae13 at yahoo.com

Thanks all for your attention.

clae.

ps here is a list of cards with linuxppc drivers:

[wvlan_cs driver] [x86,axp,ppc,smp]
	1stWave 1ST-PC-DSS11IS, DSS11IG, DSS11ES, DSS11EG
	ARtem Onair ComCard STD & EMB versions, 128- & 64-bit
	Cabletron/Enterasys RoamAbout 802.11 DS
	ELSA AirLancer MC-11
	HP F2136B
	IBM High Rate Wireless LAN
	Lucent Orinoco WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11(b)
	Melco WLI-PCM-L11, WLI-PCM-L11G
	NCR WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11
	PLANEX GeoWave/GW-CF110
	[ PrismII based cards: limited functionality ]
	Addtron AWP-100
	Ambicom WL1100 PC
	Compaq WL100
	Dell TrueMobile 1150 Series
	D-Link DWL-650
	Linksys WPC11 Instant Wireless
	SMC2632W
	ZCOMAX AirRunner/XI=300

from
http://linuxppc.org/hardware/pcmcia/index.php3?css_ok=1


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