Using AirPort with the Public Beta

Cloudscout writes "Here's a tidbit gleaned from the Mac Attack forum on the old-school text-based
telnet://atrium.innuendo.com (Atrium BBS) (yes, telnet). It's an imperfect solution to the lack of AirPort support in MacOS X Public Beta, but for those of us who simply can't live without wireless connectivity, it's worth it...
First, log into your machine and start up Terminal.app. Type:

su -

You will need to enter the password you specified for the super-user when you installed the OS. Next, type:

cd /System/Library/Extensions
mkdir Airport.kext
cd Airport.kext

Now you need to cut-and-paste the information below into a text file. First, create the text file called Info-macos.xml using whatever text editor you prefer... for most of you, it will be easiest to use pico. Here's how:

pico Info-macos.xml

Now cut-and-paste this into the editor:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM
"file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd">
<plist version="0.9">
<dict>
<key>Date</key>
<string>March 17, 2000</string>
<key>Name</key>
<string>com.apple.AirPort</string>
<key>Personality</key>
<dict>
<key>IOClass</key>
<string>AirPortDriver</string>
<key>IONameMatch</key>
<array>
<string>radio</string>
</array>
<key>IOProviderClass</key>
<string>AppleMacIODevice</string>
<key>Name</key>
<string>AppleAirPort</string>
</dict>
<key>Vendor</key>
<string>Apple Computer, Inc.</string>
<key>Version</key>
<string>0.1</string>
</dict>
</plist>

When editing is complete, press [CTRL]+[X] to save. Then reboot your system. When the system comes back up, log back in normally and start the System Peferences app and click on the Network icon. The first time you do this, there may be a relatively long delay in loading the network control panel... have patience. You will now see an additional card called "Ethernet Card 1". This is your AirPort card. You will need to click the Lock icon in order to make changes to your configuration, so do that and then set your AirPort card to DHCP (or give it a static IP address... whatever you need for your network). Unless you're going to try and set your machine up for multi-homing, you probably want to make sure you disable the Built-in Ethernet as well. Finally, reboot your system and if all goes well, you will have a usable AirPort-connected MacOS X system.

I know you're wondering, as I did, how it is selecting the SSID to connect to the right Base Station. I can only speculate that it either has the default SSID stored in the AirPort card from the last time you used it with OS 9, or it just selects the best connection from publicly available networks which means this may not work if you have your Base Station set up for a Private network. This little hack worked for me, so best of luck to the rest of you. "