20 May 2009

Lessons Learned

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MacBook Wind.


MacBook Mini.

That makes two netbooks that I've successfully hackintoshed. After countless rounds of installation, reinstallation, tweaking, applying kexts, updating and then some more tweaking, have I truly understood the game?

Perhaps I'd just try to summarize what wisdom I've gained from this story and journey into these few guiding rules:

Initial OS X installation:



1) Get a decent broadband connection - this is how you get your hands on installer .iso's and hackintosh forums and kexts; pretty much the essence of it all.

2) Always keep the ff. peripherals handy: external mouse, keyboard, hard drive - there's no guarantee that your netbook's keyboard and trackpad will be supported/recognized by OS X out of the box. As for the hard drive, I prefer creating a bootable installer from an external hard drive as installation is much faster than from DVD. USB flash drives work great too; just be sure to get one with 16 gigs or at the very least, 8 gigs or Mac OS X Leopard just won't fit in.

3) DVD writer - if this is your first hackintosh, it would be easier to start off by burning the .iso into DVD and boot from that to install OS X.

Updating to 10.5.x (OS X already up and running on the netbook):

1) OSX86 Universal Installer - already contains the OSx86_Essentials kexts, DSDT Patcher, and Chameleon bootloader installer. It's already got kext install feature but you can get Kext Helper b7 as a separate app.

2) Back up of your kexts, files etc - for reinstallation after the update.

3) External mouse, keyboard - as the update might potentially break your input devices.

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