AX88178 USB Gigabit ethernet driver and Mac OS X Lion

UPDATED: see below

Big Lion install fest yesterday. Other than a few hiccups, all went well on all of my Macs.

However, I ran into two problems:

1. When the Lion installer rebooted on my 2006 MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo), it booted into the recovery partition. I quit the installer, selected the boot disk as the startup disk, rebooted back into Snow Leopard, and restarted the Lion installer. The install then worked correctly. Not sure why that happened; older hardware?

2. On my Late 2010 MacBook Air, I use the Monoprice USB Gigabit ethernet dongle so that I can connect wired at work (yes, it’s USB 2.0, so it’s only ~200 Mb/s, but that’s better than 100 Mb/s). The Lion install was flawless, but when the new OS came up, I had no wired Ethernet connection. I downloaded and re-ran the AX88178 driver for Mac OS 10.4/10.5/10.6 installer, and after another reboot, the dongle worked correctly. I have noticed that sometimes it autoselects 100baseTX instead of 1000baseT now, and I did have one crash (not sure what that was related to). Hopefully Asix can release a new 10.7 Lion driver soon.

UPDATE: Asix released a new driver for Lion here.