Many wireless LAN cards are supported by OS X, especially PCI and mini-PCI ones. For the ones based on the broadcom chipset see this tutorial.

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Many Wireless cards from a variety of brands such as Dell, Linksys, Netgear and more all have the common Broadcom chipset within them. This is easily supported under OS X.

To find out if your wireless card has a Broadcom chipset you must look for the Vendor ID 14e4 which is Broadcom's unique vendor ID. You can check this under Linux or under Windows. To check for this under Windows follow these steps:

1. Right click the 'My Computer' icon from the desktop or Start Menu.
2. Click 'Manage' from the menu.
3. Scroll down to device manager on the left hand side and select it
4. Locate your WiFi card under 'Network adapters'
6. Right-click and select 'Properties'
7. Navigate to the 'Details' tab
8. Choose Hardware Ids from the drop down menu
9. Now pick the first 4 characters after VEN_ to get your Vendor ID, in this case it is 14E4, the same as a Broadcom chipset
10. Next write down your Device ID, the 4 characters after DEV_ as you will need these later. Here the ID is 4318.

Now we need to boot into OS X and adjust the relevant kext. First navigate to /System/Library/Extensions and backup IO80211Family.kext. Next open up a Terminal window and proceed with the following:

• Type: sudo -s
• cd /System/Library/Extensions
• nano IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext/Contents/Info.plist
• Locate the following lines of text:
  • • <string>pci14e4,4311</string>
      <string>pci14e4,4318</string>
      <string>pci14e4,4320</string>
• Now replicate this to include your Device ID as follows:
• <string>pci14e4,XXXX</string> with XXXX being your 4 character long Device ID
• Exit nano with Ctrl + X
• Staying in terminal type: chmod -R 755 IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext
• chown -R root:wheel IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext
• touch /System/Library/Extensions
• Exit Terminal and reboot

Your WiFi should now be recognised as an Apple Airport card and you can configure this through System Preferences. This may not work with all Broadcom based cards but it works with the majority. If your card is PCMCIA and you have a working PCMCIA slot then you can try replacing the pci with pcmcia.