I recently moved a Mac Tower running 10.4 to another room to make room for an upgrade machine with a monster sized screen. Unfortunately I smacked right into a problem: my Ethernet cables aren’t located anywhere in that room. I wound up having to look at Wireless Adapters but I had a case of Apple Fear—when you know that you’re going to have to shell out some serious dollars to make a Mac functional with non-Apple equipment.

I looked through my box of Electronic Stuff to see what I had available hoping for some quickie fix. Here’s the three possible options that all worked.

Option 1: A super long Ethernet cable. Frankly this option is totally ugly even if it gave me awesome hardwired speed. The wire trailed across two rooms resulting in a walking hazard. Functional, but ugly.

Option 2: Convert a router to a wi-fi adapter. Taking a Linksys Wireless G router that I have in the box, I flashed the firmware with dd-wrt. This allowed me to set the router as a wireless bridge which would push an IP address through to any connected Ethernet devices. Once flashed and set up, all you have to do is plug the Ethernet cables in from the mac to the router—wi-fi enabled. But honestly, I also have an X-Box 360 in this room and I would rather have the ability to use Xbox Live on the thing so I just hooked it up to the X-Box and left it at that.

Option 3: Belkin F5D7050 USB Wireless Adapter. I had this little thing hanging around to plug into PC’s or Linux boxes which could use it in a pinch. Unfortunately there are no drivers for the Mac to support the thing. You plug it into the USB port and it doesn’t even know something is plugged in. You could try installing old Mac Drivers for other versions of the USB Adapter but they just won’t work—apparently there were that many differences in device versions.

Enter RalinkTech who designs chipsets for several USB Mini Cards and actually has chipset drivers that work with the Belkin USB device. Once installed and after a restart, the Mac recognizes the device and allows you to jump onto the SSID.

Virtually free (if you have the equipment already) to Cheap (I think the adapter runs at about twenty bucks) and the setup is a breeze.

Update: I unplugged the Adapter, used a spare ethernet cable from my wireless bridge and now my Xbox 360 and my mac both connect to the internet using the same wireless bridge router. Awesome. The USB Adapter can now be used for my linux box upstairs.