root / ray / fotos / AirportLinux A few impressions from Linuxing my Airport Base Station. Thanks to Till Straumann for making this possible! I replaced the modem with a G4port (the Stealth Port G4 should be ok as well). It works, but I had to remove a few modem specific routines in Till's code. As you can see, it's always nice to have an old Mac with a serial port around :) 1-board-top.jpg 66.6KB The heart of Apple's Graphite Base Station: A plain vanilla KarlNet reference design based on the AMD Elan400 Microcontroller (beneath the Lucent WLAN card). Lucent's Orinoco RG-1000 is based on the same design (and it's cheaper, too -- less than 200 Euros in Germany). Walk over to SeattleWireless for more info (and better pictures). 2-board-back-with-g4port.jpg 94.1KB The G4Port sits in the place usually occupied by the venerable Apple V90 modem, also used in the PowerBook G3 (Pismo) and the PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth). 3-g4port-sideview.jpg 53.2KB The G4Port is connected to the board with a proprietary 40pin connector. Yuck! 4-board-tilted.jpg 71.9KB   5-g4port-tilted.jpg 56.1KB The G4Port is basically just an adapter from the impossible-to-get Apple 40pin connector to a serial port (with a few capacitors and a gate thrown in for good measure). The 8pin header to the serial connector has 2 mm spacing instead of the widely used 2.54 mm. This is unfortunate, because I have a secret mission for the modem signals (DCD, DTR, CTS). 6-lightshow.jpg 52KB   7-mini-din.jpg 38.4KB Old-Skool Apple serial connectors (aka Mini-DIN, RS422). 8-monitor-1.jpg 46KB The bootup sequence of the Airport output via serial port, displayed in ZTerm. TillLoad, Etherboot, Kernel. 9-monitor-2.jpg 36.3KB