So, the options as I have discovered
are the following:
1. There's a guy that has crammed a cheap orinoco gold card into the airport slot. He stripped all of the plastic
covering off of the card, removed the metal housing that covers up the RAM slot of the ibook, and (gulp) tweaks
the card into the pcmcia slot. This is a good option if you're still running Mac OSX because the orinoco has the
same chip set as the airport card.
side note: Mac people will swear that this is no pcmcia slot. They'll say something about it having extra pins that do different stuff yadda yadda yadda....Look, if you can put a pcmcia slotted card in it and have it work normally, I'll go out on a limb and say it's a pcmcia slot.
2. Other wifi cards that adhere to the shorter size are:
Cisco 350 aironet cards. - They have 3 different types, one for pci, two for pcmcia. Out of those, only 1 has an
antenna.
Zcomax
Both of these cards are high dollar cards that fit in a smaller package, and like the airport, I couldn't track these down for a lower price.
So, I settled on the Senao wifi card. Here's the why's:
I ebayed the Senao card for about 30 bucks. They aren't all that cheap, but they are abundant enough that I found an auction for the cards that had no label on them (who knows why they did that) and they were also in a large dutch auction. Secondly, the Senao is in the same tier as the Cisco and the Zcomax cards in that they are long range wireless cards. So here's the punch line: This card pumps out 200 mW of power! Your average 2.4 GHz wifi card outputs around 30 mW of power. Now i'm no electrical engineer...but I did get all the way through 3rd grade and know that the Senao outputs roughly 7 times the amount of power of your average card. Lastly, the card fits in the slot! I wasn't sure at the time I bought it, but it was a hunch I was willing to gamble 30 of my hard earned dollars on. Here's a shot:
While it does have an external antenna, it is much shorter than the other wifi cards. Also, you can see one of the two external antenna jacks that come on the card. This will be good later for the apple built in antenna. Right around these jacks are a couple of raised plastic bumps. Keep these in mind because I had to get rid of them to make the card fit.
This picture is actually after I did a little work on the card (sorry, I forgot to take pics until after the fact). It just fits in the card slot perfectly, as if it was made to fit there. However, what wasn't made to fit perfectly was the antenna connectors. They were almost the right size to fit together. It was ugly and more of a hack job than anything, but I got the trusty dremel tool out and removed the outer sleeve from the laptop's antenna connector. Once this was done, the inner probe would slide into the female connector on the card, and because of the tight quarters, it stays in. So, enough with the explanation, here's some pics. The first one shows the quick dremel job I did on the wireless card to remove the little knobbies so that it would fit nicely in the laptop. It's fuzzy, but it's the best I could do.
1. There's a guy that has crammed a cheap orinoco gold card into the airport slot. He stripped all of the plastic
covering off of the card, removed the metal housing that covers up the RAM slot of the ibook, and (gulp) tweaks
the card into the pcmcia slot. This is a good option if you're still running Mac OSX because the orinoco has the
same chip set as the airport card.
side note: Mac people will swear that this is no pcmcia slot. They'll say something about it having extra pins that do different stuff yadda yadda yadda....Look, if you can put a pcmcia slotted card in it and have it work normally, I'll go out on a limb and say it's a pcmcia slot.
2. Other wifi cards that adhere to the shorter size are:
Cisco 350 aironet cards. - They have 3 different types, one for pci, two for pcmcia. Out of those, only 1 has an
antenna.
Zcomax
Both of these cards are high dollar cards that fit in a smaller package, and like the airport, I couldn't track these down for a lower price.
So, I settled on the Senao wifi card. Here's the why's:
I ebayed the Senao card for about 30 bucks. They aren't all that cheap, but they are abundant enough that I found an auction for the cards that had no label on them (who knows why they did that) and they were also in a large dutch auction. Secondly, the Senao is in the same tier as the Cisco and the Zcomax cards in that they are long range wireless cards. So here's the punch line: This card pumps out 200 mW of power! Your average 2.4 GHz wifi card outputs around 30 mW of power. Now i'm no electrical engineer...but I did get all the way through 3rd grade and know that the Senao outputs roughly 7 times the amount of power of your average card. Lastly, the card fits in the slot! I wasn't sure at the time I bought it, but it was a hunch I was willing to gamble 30 of my hard earned dollars on. Here's a shot:
While it does have an external antenna, it is much shorter than the other wifi cards. Also, you can see one of the two external antenna jacks that come on the card. This will be good later for the apple built in antenna. Right around these jacks are a couple of raised plastic bumps. Keep these in mind because I had to get rid of them to make the card fit.
Doing the dirty work
First thing I did when the card came in was to put it into the laptop slot and see if it was going to fit:
This picture is actually after I did a little work on the card (sorry, I forgot to take pics until after the fact). It just fits in the card slot perfectly, as if it was made to fit there. However, what wasn't made to fit perfectly was the antenna connectors. They were almost the right size to fit together. It was ugly and more of a hack job than anything, but I got the trusty dremel tool out and removed the outer sleeve from the laptop's antenna connector. Once this was done, the inner probe would slide into the female connector on the card, and because of the tight quarters, it stays in. So, enough with the explanation, here's some pics. The first one shows the quick dremel job I did on the wireless card to remove the little knobbies so that it would fit nicely in the laptop. It's fuzzy, but it's the best I could do.
Once
I got the card trimmed down, I put it back into the slot, plugged in
the trimmed up antenna connector and turned on the ibook. One of
the great things about the Senao card is that the drivers are built
into the linux 2.6 kernel...so it was truly plug and play. This
is great for linux since almost nothing is plug and play with it.
But sure enough, I fired up the laptop and opened my handy wireless
network connection program, and it connected to my wireless network
with no problems. That's it. I'd like to say it was
hard...but it only took a few minutes to modify the card and get it
running with my home network. Here's some pics. The second
one is a repeat, but you can see very clearly where I sanded on the
card a bit to get it to fit nicely in the airport slot without putting
stress on the keyboard.
