Mac geniuses: how can I make sure this driver works?

Factual Questions
1

I’m assuming something’s wrong, because I can’t find this USB wifi adapter in the Network settings on System Preferences. Is it possible to tell if a driver is meant for PPC chips? If so, then running this new Lion installation is never going to work with the driver I found. The rest of the story:

I found an old Belkin USB wifi adapter, which my friend’s iMac could really use to boost the reception. Belkin doesn’t offer an Intel-based OSX driver for this, but Google knows everything if you stick with it.

This page tells me the chipset it’s running: Belkin F5D7050E running Realtek 8187b chipset under 2.6.27 (FC9) (Realtek 8187b). I got the driver for OS 10.5 here: http://152.104.125.41/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PFid=1&Level=6&Conn=5&ProdID=143&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true

I still can’t find how to turn on the adapter as the method of contacting the network. I get a warning about uninstalling other drivers properly, like this:http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k110/flavord/ScreenShot2012-06-21at93513PM.png. When I try to use the uninstall command, I get this: http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k110/flavord/ScreenShot2012-06-21at100001PM.png Notice that the password “root” doesn’t actually work.

So, in my previous attempts with other versions of Realtek drivers, I just dragged the folders and installer to the trash. I don’t know if I’ve left something installed that’s interfering with properly installing the new driver, or what.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

2

You have to check System Information and first click on USB devices to see if the USB device is recognized by the OS, then click on Network to see if the driver is loaded and displaying device information. If neither of those is true, click on Logs, then Kernel log to look at the boot up messages. If there’s an error with the driver, it should show up in the messages somewhere. If the driver is PPC only, you won’t see any messages about the driver at all.

If however you’ve merely installed improperly, the kext file (contains the driver) in /System/Library/Extensions won’t load. You may have to do a permissions repair in Disk Utility to fix that.

If the driver is the correct one and is loading and initializing correctly, then you will see it in System Information|Network, but you may not see it in Network Preferences if the device hasn’t been enabled. To do that, you’ll have to open up Terminal and type in the command “ifconfig” first to see if the device is present (probably listed as “en#” where “#” is a number), then type in “sudo ifconfig en# up” (replacing the “#” with the proper number) to enable the device.