Dossy's Blog

After getting totally fed up with the poor Wi-Fi range on my MacBook Pro, I picked up an external Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N. Of course, Linksys doesn’t provide Mac drivers for this product, but it’s a Ralink 2870 and Ralink provides drivers for MacOS X in their support section. I downloaded the RTUSB D2870-2.0.0.0 UI-2.0.0.0_2009_10_02.dmg driver (5.2 MB).

There is a driver inside USBWireless-10.6 for Snow Leopard, and it will complain during installation that the RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext failed to install. This is expected, just ignore it, the installation will complete successfully.

At the time of this writing, the WUSB600N v2 isn’t included in the Info.plist for the kext, so I had to edit /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist in a text editor and add the appropriate bits. Search for “Linksys – RT2870 – 2″ and duplicate the <key> and <dict> elements, renaming the key to “Linksys – RT2870 – 3″ and the idProduct integer from “113″ to “121″. Here’s what it should look like after the changes:

        <key>Linksys - RT2870 - 3</key>
        <dict>
            <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
            <string>com.Ralink.driver.RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
            <key>IOClass</key>
            <string>RT2870USBWirelessDriver</string>
            <key>IOProviderClass</key>
            <string>IOUSBDevice</string>
            <key>idProduct</key>
            <integer>121</integer>
            <key>idVendor</key>
            <integer>5943</integer>
        </dict>

After making this change, unload/reload the kext or reboot your machine, and then plug in your WUSB600N and you should get a window popping up telling you that a new network device has been detected.

I hope this helps someone, as I was totally disappointed when I learned that Linksys wasn’t supporting this device on Mac “out of the box.”

This entry was posted by Dossy Shiobara on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Geeking out, Product placement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.