Thursday, May 05, 2011

Alfa AWUS036H 1W USB Adapter and Apple Mac OS Snow Leopard 10.6 64-bit kernel

Editor's update 5/30/2011: Realtek has announced the end-of-life for the Realtek RTL8187L chipset, meaning no further driver development for this chipset will take place. The Alfa AWUS036H contains this chipset, so it will not be compatible with Mac OS 10.6 64-bit kernel boot, it will only work with the 32-bit kernel boot.

The Alfa AWUS036H long range 1000mW wireless USB adapter is compatible with Mac OS Snow Leopard 10.6. However it does not work with Macs running Snow Leopard that boot a 64-bit kernel.

The good news is almost all Mac models sold prior to February 2011 that run Snow Leopard boot a 32-bit kernel and all Macs (that we are aware of) sold after February 2011 can be set to boot to a 32-bit kernel.

We have created this support PDF file that details how to find out what kernel your Mac boots, how to set your Mac to boot a 32-bit kernel if it is currently booting a 64-bit kernel, and exactly what this means and how it does/does not affect your Mac’s performance.

apple1 alfalogo

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

When will 64-bit drivers be forthcoming?

Rokland LLC said...

We do not have an ETA. The drivers are written by the chipset maker and so it does take a little time to test and debug. We will make a posting when 64-bit drivers are available.

Rokland LLC said...

To update our earlier comment, Realtek will no longer be releasing newer versions of RTL8187L software unfortunately as they just announced its EOL.