open-source driver question

Hi, I'm a linux guy and have used netbsd, openbsd, freebsd etc in the past but never tangled with the kernel or drivers outside of Linux.

My mother has fried her ethernet port on her iMac (G4 I think); I recently sent her a silicom USB U2E (usb 2 ethernet) dongle which is evidently not recognized by OS-X. This device works with most linux distros out of the box, and uses the "kaweth" driver which is available on sourceforge. The driver page says it's POSIX compliant which makes me hopeful but I don't know how to proceed.

I'm comfortable with building and installing modules, or even rebuilding the kernel if that's necessary, but I don't know where to start with MacOS. Could someone point me to a resource, or if this driver is already implemented and just needs the VID/PID added to a config file somewhere (or some other trivial step), point me to that?

Thanks for your help.

Stephen

Darwin (Apple's open source flavor of BSD Unix that powers Mac OS X) uses a complicated build system and nontraditional kernel. I doubt you would be able to compile and use the driver even if it is POSIX compatible if it hasn't been explicitly ported over to the Darwin platform. Your mother should have the iMac serviced by Apple. They're known to be fairly generous with repairs.

thanks for the response... I ended up finding a usb ethernet dongle that actually would work and it's under $30 - simpler solutions are better I think!