Wiki

Older Revision of Automate the Ralink Wireless Connection on Mac OS X

Revision: 20081119_015755 | All Revisions

Automate the Ralink Wireless Connection on Mac OS X

It's a comfortable feeling that Ralink supports the Mac OS X by providing drivers for its network adapters. The Ralink RT2700E B/G/N miniPCIe network card is a great example. It works find on the Mac OS X operating system with the RT2860 driver that Ralink provides. Although Ralink provides a great service to the Macintosh community, it's network card driver could be polished up a bit and could be more integrated with the AirPort service.

Currently, the Ralink network card requires you to use the WirelessUtilityCardbusPCI interface to enable/disable wireless service. And you have to disable and re-enable it every time you turn on your computer and every time you wake it up from sleep. This document will provide you with the software and show you how to set it up so that the process is automated.

Comments & Discussion >>

RaWireless Automator

The software application that will help you automate the wireless connection is the RaWireless Automator. It's a free GPL AppleScript that can be called at login and when the computer wakes up from sleep. It will launch WirelessUtilityCardbusPCI application, disable/enable the connection, and shut it down. You can get a copy of it from the link below.

RaWireless Automator (GPL)

After downloading the RaWireless Automator sofware, you can drop it into the Finder's Applications directory (/Applications). You can even launch it a few times manually to see it in action.

Comments & Discussion >>

Automation with SleepWatcher

In order to launch RaWireless Automator at login and at wakeup, you'll need to install SleepWatcher, a free GPL utility for Mac OS X. Follow the instruction presented in the following link to install SleepWatcher on your system.

Installing SleepWatcher on Mac OS X

Once you installed SleepWatcher as instructed by the link above, it is time to set-up the automation. If you have used SleepWatcher in the past, chances are you have already created a .wakeup file in your user account's root directory. If so, you can simply add the follow line to that file.

  "/Applications/RaWireless Automator.app"

If, on the other hand, you have never used SleepWatcher before, you can either create the .wakeup file yourself with the command above, or you can download a .wakeup file that already has the necessary command(s). The following link contains the .wakeup file you can download. Place it in your user account's home directory.

RaWireless Automator .wakeup (GPL)

After placing the .wakeup file in the home directory, give it read and execute permissions. Use the following command to change its permission.

  chmod 755 "${HOME}/.wakeup"

At this point, you are done. SleepWatcher will do all the work for you. You can put your computer to sleep and wake it up, SleepWatcher and RaWireless Automator will establish your wireless connection for you.

Comments & Discussion >>

Copyright © 1996 - 2024. All Rights Reserved.