Daily Archives: January 7, 2012

Jan 7 2012

Wi-Fi Issues with Lion

VirtualBox

If you happen to use the hField Wi-Fire Long Range Wi-Fi Adapter and use Leopard on your Mac, whatever you do, don’t upgrade to Lion, just yet. The problem is that once you upgrade to Lion your Wi-Fire will no longer work.

This is a real pain and according to hField, Apple have yet to help them fix the problem. Seems its something to do with the 64 bit kernel in Lion. Apparently the instructions Apple have issued to developers for updating their apps for Lion don’t seem to work, at least as far as the Wi-Fire is concerned.

Now, as some of you know, I am the Official UK Reseller of the Wi-Fire, and so this is something of a blow, both in terms of its impact on would-be customers who sue Lion and those thinking of upgrading. It also affect existing customers who have upgraded to Lion only to find they can no longer use their Wi-Fire. Now, you may be asking, why don’t they just use Airport? Well, usually customers purchase the Wi-Fire because they can’t get a decent and reliable signal using Airport or other external adapters. So, reverting to using their built-in card or another brand of external adapter isn’t an option in most cases.

Of course, wishing to everything possible to help my customers I have searched high and low for a solution. As yet, I haven’t found one and Apple certainly don’t seem interested. hField are waiting on Apple, whilst Apple seem to be taking their time to respond.

In the meantime, the only viable solution is to either downgrade to Leopard or Snow Leopard. Rather than uninstalling Lion my advice is to use VirtualBox to run Snow Leopard alongside Lion in a virtualisation set-up.

Download VirtualBox for free here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Follow walk-through here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/virtualbox-running-windows-on-a-mac-for-free-sort-of/

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