Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Using USB-to-Ethernet Adapters in OS X

If the Ethernet port of your OS X Macintosh has failed (the motherboard-based port in my mother-in-law's iMac was damaged by lightning), or you wish to run multiple wired Ethernet ports (i.e., to use an old Mac as a router), you may have wished to use one of the many USB adapters for wired Ethernet available. Alas, there have been few manufacturers of these adapters who provided drivers for Macintosh - I know of no current products which have OS X support.

Peter Sichel of Sustainable Softworks (developer of networking software products for Macintosh) and Daniel Sumorok have developed open-source drivers for Mac OS 10.3 and 10.4 which allow the use of many, if not most, commonly available "Windows-only" USB-to-Ethernet adapters. Read Peter's article and download the free drivers here.

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