Discovery

I have been very busy lately and that's most probably how I'll be describing myself as for at least the next 2 months.

With loads of papers to write (all four of them due on the 4th of January next year, and if you must know, they're subjects from the Université de Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, and the curriculum is in French) and PDF's to read - apparently that's how "high tech" the distance learning program is for DU ECDF (mp3's of actual class lectures, please?).

But anyway, it's no secret that I'd migrated to the "Root Installation" several days ago and then I've been doing what testing I could for a friend from the forums. Things weren't exactly what one would distinguish as components of a "controlled environment" for experiments. In short, my system could possibly be already a mess.

And it was acting up - hangs at "SMC not found" line. I should've taken a picture of my screen but it's something to that effect when I boot verbose. It's worse in graphical mode because all I could see was that grey Apple logo on a lighter grey backdrop and the spinning wheel continued to "spin", fooling me to think the system was still busy loading when in reality, it already went comatose on me. Frustrating in short.

The only way I could gain my Desktop again was to boot with -v -f flags. Which is not acceptable.

But I need this Mini MacBook Pro for school - to write those tons of papers in French. So in a desperate move to solve my predicament the fastest way I knew, I deleted the Extra folder from "/" and then fired up HF7c. I was back to EFI boot method.

When HF7c was created, I was still on 10.6.4 and I had to install PCEFI 10.6 in replacement of Chameleon RC4 in order to solve that ever annoying "blank screen on wake issue".

Guess what? I no longer had that problem after I re-installed HF7c. Puzzling.

Not really. I had upgraded to 10.6.5 several days ago and now I think that's got a lot to do with sleep/resume working fine on my system now. Am I just dreaming or has 10.6.5 + HF7c done the trick?

Thank You!

To all of you who gave me some donuts to chew on, I express my sincerest gratitude. You know who you are :D

I now have hosting fees for my new domain savingforamac.com covered.

Thanks again, you make writing for this blog an even more rewarding experience than it already is.

Growing Pains

Hi all,

Right now, the HP Mini 311 Darwin Project is going under a major overhaul, in terms of "project releases" at least - all those HFx installers you get to download and test every once in a while.

Here are the changes:
1. Beta (Retail Pack 1.1x) - Chameleon RC5; LegacyAGPM for graphics chip power management carried over from Retail Pack 1.0. There still are issues of course; i.g. sleep/resume, restart and other stuff.
2. Real trackpad - Alps Trackpad can be recognized as a real trackpad now with a kext and a hacked prefPane but this solution is still NOT perfect; i.e. it's without real sidescrolling. And some people actually prefer PS2 mouse with sidescrolling.
3. Root boot method - it has been decided that EFI be removed as main boot method. As of now, a semi-manual configuration can be done via Lizard, Kext Utility. But a .pkg auto installer is brewing which we're hesitant to release since it still needs lots of polishing - after all, we don't want to mess up your precious little Mini MacBook Pro.

Aside from that, if you've been following the HPM311DP thread at InsanelyMac, you've heard that TheKing is onboard and he's been doing some investigations on the current state of things and poking around the DSDT, discovering things. Also, there's this new AppleUSBCardReader.kext by iLeopod that makes the card reader slot recognized as,well, a card reader and not as just some generic drive.

Anyway, you can just visit the HP Mini 311 Darwin Project Thread and read up on the progress personally.

What this means is that yes, it's true that things are blurry and a bit chaotic at the present but that's because a lot of things, good ones, are also coming our way. Possibly - I hope those brilliant people do get the results they're expecting of their hackintosh experiments.