O Hardware, Hardware, Wherefore Art Thou...

...Hardware? Deny thy clockspeed and refuse thy UUID; or if thou will not, be but sworn my love and I will no longer be a (good) hackintosh.

LeMaurien19: (because Hardware is not properly recognized, hence cannot say his line) Shall I hear more, or shall tweak (EFI kexts) at this?

Your hackintosh can camouflage as any Mac model - a MacBook, MacPro3,3, MacBook Air etc. One way to get that done is edit your smbios.plist's keys and strings and put it in /Extra for Chameleon to read and load as it boots OS X. But it's not perfect - I for one, cannot rectify my system's UUID via smbios edit; I've had to add a UUID.kext containing my AirPort Extreme card's MAC address (actually just a rebranded Broadcom card that came from the guts of my deceased Mini 1000, bless its silicon soul) to get my UUID reported properly in Snow Leopard as per "genuine Mac practices".

And then there's SMBIOSResolver.kext. In fact, I'm thinking of customizing what I see in System Profiler's report about my HP Mini 311 disguising as a MacBookAir2,1 via SMBIOSResolver.kext.

I'll update this post for the results.

Proof Of Concept

VoodooHDA.kext is a great kext - it's the reason why I don't have to live with a mute Mini MacBook forever. It solved that one detail that caused my conversion to a believer in the HP Mini 1000 as a hackintosh. It even broke the love spell I was under with the MSI Wind U100. It's the reason why My MacBook Mini came to be.

But wondrous as it may be, there's still one tiny detail it can't quite do for my HP Mini 1001TU: the internal mic is still useless.

Good thing it's Christmas already and so as geeky as I am, electronics wormed its way into my gift shopping list. Thus I ended up swiping my new credit card at the nearby Apple reseller store and got myself in pretext for an early Yuletide present for myself (or one of a number of presents I plan to gift myself with - I could be Ebenezer Scrooge's kin for all I know and for my utter "me, myself and I" lovin'), an Apple iPhone 3G set of earbuds!

I've been reading for a long while in forums that it should work with the HP Mini under Mac OS X but I didn't know for sure but now I know. And I'm a believer. ;-)

Its mic works well with the HP Mini 1001TU; I only have to plug it into the port and voilà, I've got mic and am ready to Skype! :D

You'd need to go to System Preferences > Sound > Input tab to set the mic's volume and then you're good to go.

Sound quality is very decent, just as is expected of Apple hardware. As for performance, the current VoodooHDA.kext is sufficient. I don't crank up the mic's volume to max levels, highest I'd recommend would be one notch before the last notch on the slider bar. Anything beyond that creates static which causes buzzes and echoes in your ear as the mic catches sound. Audio file  resulting from recording via QuickTime X doesn't seem to register the aforementioned buzzes and echoes when played later on tho.

Also, upon resuming from sleep, the mic won't work - not really "not work" but you have to go back to Sys Pref > Sound > Input tab > and move the volume slider a bit to get back on track.

The volume (+,-) controller doesn't allow you set volume up or down, of course (it would've been too perfect - even older iPods can't take advantage of this set of controls; only the newer iPods and iPhone can)

Oh and by the way, this is the VoodooHDA.kext that I use - it allows me to adjust volume via volume control on the menubar or the fn+Function toggle keys. Or you may use the official VoodooLabs release of VoodooHDA.kext so you get a prefPane and experiment with more settings to suit your tastes.

define:idiosyncrasy

According to good ol' reliable google.com, the word "idiosyncrasy" means:

• a behavioral attribute that is distinctive and peculiar to an individual
• Idiosyncrasy, from Greek ιδιοσυγκρασία, idiosyngkrasía, "a peculiar temperament", "habit of body" (idios "one's own" and syn-krasis "mixture") is defined as an individualizing quality or characteristic of a person or group, and is often used to express eccentricity or peculiarity.

I believe that hackintoshes can be likened to inidividuals in this sense; my MacBook Wind behaves differently from my MacBook Mini. But things don't stop at that; MacBook Mini on Leopard is a totally different creature from MacBook Mini on Snow Leopard.


Various combinations of model/make/brand, Mac OS X version, and even installation method result in considerably noticeable variances in terms of user experience, or should we say "hackintoshing experience". Even just alterations in the installation method - Vanilla, EFI, Distro (msiwindosx, iDeneb, iATKOS, Leo4All, etc.) - but with the same machine and Mac OS X version can bring up circumstances in which these so called distinctive and peculiar attribute are highlighted.


I'll focus on Leopard and Snow Leopard on my precious little MacBook Mini (a 1001TU). 1000 series owners may be lucky hardware-wise - Broadcom 4315, Marvell Yukon 2 ethernet, webcam, bluetooth, etc. - the only gripe remains to be the internal mic which still doesn't work even under the new VoodooHDA.kext. Given all that however, the Mini 1000 is fairly one neat hackintoshing machine.

Cat in the Bag: Install Snow Leopard on the HP Mini

This installation method uses NetbookBootMaker. With Chameleon 2.0-RC2 already available, you might be asking why NetbookBootMaker? True, NetbookBootMaker is primarily made for the Dell Mini hackintosh but it works fine in my setup and offers noob-friendly tools as well such as ExtraUpdate - more on that later.

Update: Please see Snow Leopard Guide

This installation method uses NetbookBootMaker. With Chameleon 2.0-RC2 already available, you might be asking why NetbookBootMaker? True, NetbookBootMaker is primarily made for the Dell Mini hackintosh but it works fine in my setup and offers noob-friendly tools as well such as ExtraUpdate - more on that later.

So, let's get this rollin'! :D

Multithread or Multicore?

In order to install iDeneb on the HP Mini 1000, you have to enable the "CPUs=1" fix option or else the install will fail to boot up, leaving you scratching your head and perhaps enunciating not so pleasant words directed to the how-to-guide authors; they said it would work in the first place.

So this option specifically tells OS X that your HP Mini has only one core. Now what I'm actually perplexed about are people hacking the com.apple.Boot.plist to take out that key and string that the "CPUs=1" fix has put in there so that the HP Mini's "2 cores" will be recognized again.

1) Go to /System/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration and open com.apple.Boot.plist with your preferred plist editor or even just TextEdit.

2) Take out these lines:

<>Kernel Flags< /key>

<>cpus=1 -f< /string>

Beatrix said...

hi instead of removing those two lines? replace it with =2 on cpus like this
<>cpus=2 -f< /string>
this will prevent it from having the startup problems. :D

so your Boot plist file should look something like this:

Battery, Battery

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="188" caption="from Slim Battery site"][/caption]

You've just successfully installed Mac OS X Leopard on your precious Mini, gotten out alive from a proliferation of how-to-guides all a-jumble that you'd scourged high and low from the world wide web so you're updated to 10.5.7 or 10.5.8.

And in the pursuit of that ever ellusive happiness, you tweak your MacBook Mini to your tastes and one of the nuisances you take care of aside from the pesky resolution that would almost always break at every update (save those video kexts under "Break In Case of Update" glass), is that equally pesky warning message that tells you that:

"You are now running on reserve power."

blah blah blah

You've just unhooked your MacBook Mini from the mains just a few minutes ago and that 80% charge remaining can in no means be insufficient to run your spanking hackintosh-netbook. No way.

For the longest time, I've always opted to disable battery warning messages (System Preferences > Energy Saver - you just dig around there ;) ) and then take out the default battery icon from the Menubar. So off it has always gone to oblivion with a disgruntled poof of cartoonish smoke, never again to be summoned to grace my hackintosh computing view. I've always replaced it with Slim Battery.

But because of reasons unfathomable even to myself, I wanna be able to use the default battery menulet (yes, according to Mac OS X Leopard, The Missing Manual, that's what you call those icons sitting on your Menubar). I find that the iDeneb patches found in /.../system/Installation/Packages/Patches of the iDeneb installer disc extremely interesting.

If you're on kernel 9.7.0, that is kernel from 10.5.7 (cause you may be on 10.5.8 but using this kernel to get sleep/resume), you can install the iDeneb PowerManagement.pkg patch and forget about Slim Battery altogether.

We may or may not have the same results but it seems to have eliminated that warning message pest. Just apply the package after installing the usual kexts (VoodooPower and VoodooBattery).

Ms. International

Nope, not joining and the nerve of me to think myself qualified. I'd long accepted the fact that I'm better off being a geek. Why then the title to this new post?

Je suis francophone; French is the language with which I earn my daily bread. Once upon a time, I also spoke Italian with my batchmates in college to gossip about those Filipina version of the "Plastics" in Lindsay Lohan's Mean Girls. And before you click on that red orb (if you're on a Mac or hackintosh) or red x (if you're on, may the forces of mother nature forbid, Windoze), I'm now reluctantly learning Mandarin. Reluctant because I'd never intended to learn that language because of the complexity of Chinese characters and the tone system they use - I'm tone deaf so good luck to me. But because of a certain Taiwanovela, I got the fever and now I'm officially crazed addicted to everything Taiwanese so watching fresh video uploads on youtube.com which are neither subbed nor dubbed in the lingua franca, I'm forced to learn some Chinese and as good fortune could have it (oh my, is that feng shui/Chinese idiom related there?), my brain has actually absorbed the language.

I now recognize a number of Chinese characters and I need a tool to be able to write in Chinese in forums. At work, where we're all on black IBM boxes, I use NJStar text editor which is a pretty neat app in that it functions as a dictionary as well. At home, I'm a Mac girl - make that a Hackintosh girl - and as literate as I might seem on Mac OS X with all my blabbing about kexts and kernels and bootloaders and HFS Journaled Extended partition what-not, I'm still in awe at the discovery that Mac OS X actually supports Chinese input natively! No need to hunt down a Mac version of that NJStar text editor cause TextEdit does it brilliantly!

All I need to do is go to System Preferences > International > Input Method tab, and select Traditional Chinese (cause it's what they use in Taiwan instead of Mainland's simplified), Pinyin.

Then in the Menulet that will appear, after I'd opened up TextEdit, I just select Chinese from the dropdown menu. . .

And voilà!

A toast with my mugfull of Apple fangirl Kool-Aid: Isn't Mac OS X just totally awesome? :D

And the Never Ending Saga Continues. . .

Edit: Sleep/Resume has been resolved. Read it here.

First off, you can call me Hermione Granger-ish all you want, before taking the 10.5.8 plunge, I did some research, or to be more honest, some googling around ;) and found this interesting website.

NOTE: This is assuming you've already a working iDeneb install updated upto 10.5.7 - dsdt patched, OSx86_Essentials kexts applied, and Chameleon RC02. (I haven't checked how things would go on PCI_EFI Chameleon 1.0.12).

And like any bookworm out there who easily believes what she reads, (1) I obediently backed up my Extensions via Terminal:

$ sudo -rf /System/Library/Extensions /System/Library/Extensions_1057

Afterward, (2) I installed Disabler and dsmos kexts referenced by the aforementioned website via good ol' Kext Helper b7 but color-coded them first cause I was too lazy to check whether I had these kexts already or not in my current setup, there's no way I'd miss those red kexts now if ever I'd need to check later :D

(3) That done, I didn't reboot yet but ran the Mac OS X Delta 10.5.8 Updater (Delta because I was running 10.5.7 already, 10.5.6 and lower should get the Combo Updater) I'd downloaded just minutes before from the Apple website which, quite surprisingly, took fairly little time to install at around just 5 minutes or less.

I originally intended to reinstall VoodooPS2Controller just in case but decided at the last minute not to and (4) just hit Restart as Installer completed the update. As expected the first reboot didn't complete and the Mini restarted and once again I was face to face with Chameleon RC02 (I've updated my bootloader to the latest Chameleon, by the way, and am enjoying my OS X Boot Theme which I got from here). Then Darwin said "hi" again. The screen flickered, giving me goosebumps as I thought I'd never get into my beloved Leopard desktop. And the spinning wheel finally sprung into action and after what seemed to be a substantially longer boot time than usual, I first saw nothing but a blue screen. . .and my cursor - whew! Another 5 seconds or so, I was back into my desktop!



But everything was humongous; resolution got bricked as expected.
Perhaps this screenshot could better illustrate what happened after the update:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="461" caption="No Bluetooth, WiFi, Resolution 640x480, Color not 32-bit | Has audio, default battery monitor working (right click and open in new tab/window for screenshot's actual size)"][/caption]

It was a comfort to know that screen brightness controls weren't bricked. As it was nearing midnight already I dimmed the screen to the lowest possible before (5.1) I trudged on, reinstalling my usual kexts via OSx86 Tools and not Kext Helper since unlike the latter (Kext Helper b7 it turns out, also backs up your kexts), OSx86 Tools would create a backup folder of the 10.5.8 kexts it replaced which I wanted to look at after. I started with the system kexts which seems to have restored WiFi and Bluetooth. I had no problems with sound as VoodooHDA still worked after the update.

(5.2) Now for the video kexts. You can opt to reinstall all of the kexts in one go; I just decided to separately install them because (a) they're already sorted into two different folders in my drive and OSx86 only allows installing 1 folder of kexts at a time and (b) I'm just weird that way. Restarted and bingo!

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Bluetooth, WiFi (Airport), Audio, Battery, 1024 x 600 32-bit (right click and open in new tab/window screenshot in actual size)"][/caption]

There was that nasty "You are running on reserve power" battery warning again and in wanting to screenshot it, I tried to make it pop again by putting MacBook Mini to sleep so I closed the lid and it was late when it dawned upon me that the usual flickering of the white power led and switching off of the fan didn't happen. I reopened the lid and there were the tell-tale signs of a broken Sleep/Resume that were all too familiar to me by then. I knew I had no choice but to force shutdown the Mini and turn it back on so I plugged in my broadband cable to check if ethernet worked. It did. It does.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="482" caption="No need for Yukon2.kext, just be sure to plug in cable before booting up"][/caption]

Now for a summary. At first I thought I was gonna end up listing down the few stuff that still worked but, as it turned out, I'm now writing what doesn't work which means the general outcome of this experiment isn't so bad after all:

1) Sleep/Resume - once you put the Mini to sleep either by closing the lid or pressing fn+f1 combo keys, the screen does switch off but so do the trackpad and, I assume, the keyboard as well, never to be woken up again but by forcing the machine to shutdown and just turn it back on again.

2) Fan - it's gotten hyperactive I guess as it now whirls away with fervent gusto at maximum right from the start and it's noisy.

I would've also listed the battery warning nuissance pop-up alert but that's easily ignored or resolved by turning off battery warning in System Preferences, taking out the default OS X battery meter from the Menubar (enjoy seeing it vanish in a poof of smoke) and using Slim Battery Monitor instead.

What happened to my 10.5.7's Extension folder's back up now? I'm keeping it safe for the meantime as I try to figure out how to resolve the issues mentioned above; the kexts can come quite handy, who knows.

For issue # 1, I'll have to try the old SleepEnabler kext and/or review VoodooUSBEHCI again for some hints. For issue #2, I'm gonna see how posta74's fan solution works out on this one.

All of this is actually reminiscent of struggles with previous updates 10.5.6 and 10.5.7, still fresh in my mind - 10.5.8 is déjà vu. Creepy, I know.

And now I've turned another fork in the road - Harry Potter's lightning scar no longer burns; the King has returned to rule the whole of Middle Earth and even Gollum has found his peace and so has Frodo (though I still doubt he's come out of the closet yet ;) ) and Luke Skywalker has swung his last light saber - sagas have come to their own grand close yet this hackintoshing journey of mine seems to never end. T_T

August 5, 2009

While the whole Philippine nation will remember yesterday as one of the most touching events in their history (me included in the "their" there) as they bade farewell to a great woman whose unfailing faith in freedom had fueled minds, fed souls of today who are now enjoying the democracy she helped bring forth, the rest of Apple-dom and Apple fanboys and girls alike will perhaps remember August 5, 2009 as the day that 10.5.8, what may be the last OS X Leopard update before Snow Leopard will be official, was released.

Delta Updater | Combo Updater

While I and my family remained glued to the TV set in the living to pay our respect to this great leader in the only way we could then, my fellow hackintoshers had already downloaded 10.5.8 from Apple's website and were trying it on their own iterations of MacBook Mini's each. Thus, when I visited myhpmini.com this morning fresh from grieving my country's loss of its valuable pillar of society, this was the conversation thread that welcomed me:

> Intel9295
Now, to any HP mini Hackintosh users: DO NOT UPGRADE! This update could break your install. Wait until someone more qualified does it (LeMaurien, we are looking at you) and see's what it does. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

Don't be stupid.

> MrFairladyz » Wed Aug 05, 2009 11:40 pm
My wifi wasnt working so i just updated to see what changes. So far, the display resolution issue is back (it only shows 640x480 instead of 1024x576... i think this is only a problem on the 110's, though.)

I'm re-installing all the kexts now.

edit: okay, i've re-installed the kexts. wifi is still not working (i don't know if it will mess up your wifi, but mine wasn't working to begin with.) Display and everything else is back to normal. No noticable changes, what was this update for?

> ravic » Thu Aug 06, 2009 12:56 am
I was having lot of trouble with Bluetooth PAN, I wonder if this would fix it?
I will wait for some time before attempting to upgrade.

> ConfuzedOne » Thu Aug 06, 2009 1:29 am

Don't be a chicken.. upgrade you fools! :P what's the worse thing that can happen? :P

> lukehale » Thu Aug 06, 2009 1:32 am

Only post-upgrade issue I have is my sleep fails to function, and I have to restart if I shut the lid :(. That also means bluetooth doesn't work because to get it working you have to close and reopen the lid. . . which causes it to sleep. . . which fails. Other than that it is working wonderfully. I will get back to you all if I find a solution to the sleep issue :)

Based from these results, it's basically the same conundrum of issues with hardware rendered non-functional by the update; not unlike what's happened with the other previous updates, 10.5.6 and 10.5.7. Among the issues, it's Sleep/Resume that's bothering me the most but I'm not losing hope - if people found solutions for this and a lot more others in 10.5.6 and 10.5.7, why not in 10.5.8? I haven't tried for myself the update yet so I find no reason to just dismiss this hurdle as unsurvivable ;)

I can't wait to get acquainted with 10.5.8. Now if only I hadn't a regular day job. . .

LABAN!

DVDPlayer

So I've already posted this over at the other blog, macbookwind, but I thought I'd put it as well here.

For those uncomfortable with editing the DVDPlayback file with a hex editor, just download this file , unzip it and then navigate to

/System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A

to copy paste the file in that folder. Authenticate as you are prompted.

Note: as always, as safety precaution, you may want to first make a back up copy of your original DVDPlayback file before doing this. Also, DVDPlayer won't work when an external DVD drive is not plugged in via USB.

Fangirling

Edit: (Some clarifications from posta74)

"Just some clarifications:

- the fan spin gently as you noticed, but you will find also that when the temperature goes too up (rarely), it will run on higher rpm to chill down the Mini again.

- my video res is 1024×576 (HP Mini 2140SD), however the Apple boot logo results not altered as I’ve modified it with photoshop."

Before you say "What the &*&(!*^*)!!", let me tell you this has nothing to do Asian metrosexual-boybands-who-have-to-review-English-grammar-seriously or  frou-frou-girlbands-who-look-like-fish-vendors-without-makeup.

This is about the HP Mini 1000's fan. Do you ever wonder why the Mini gets a little too hot to the touch after using it for quite a while?

A League Of Our Own

MacBook Mini's, let's all reunite!

You've seen mine and now here's one other Mini on OS X Leopard:

(ubi de feo's baby)

(lmwong's MacBook Mini)

Where's yours and how's your MacBook Mini experience so far? :D

Bootloader

They say condemn the sin and not the sinner and then I haven't had much disgrunts about Windows if I think back of the days when I was purely a Windows dudette. I do prefer OS X over Windows but not so much so that I'd let bashing Win XP dominate my days here on this earth. But why did I do this one?

I've gone back to dual booting as you may well know. I've no idea what went wrong but PC_EFI alone wouldn't do the dual boot trick for which I turned to chain0.

Setting it couldn't be easier, and in XP too:

1) Download and unzip chain0 to C:\ - or whatever drive your XP installation currently resides.

2) Go to My Computer > Properties > Advanced tab > Settings. And from the System startup section, click on Edit:

Welcome!

I guess the Obsessive Compulsive in me still hasn't been eradicated - not entirely...yet. So I reset my MacBook Mini via OSx86 Tools

And I finally got a glimpse of the OS X Welcome vid!


I didn't expect to see any effects of this performance-wise on my MacBook Mini but I was well surprised that my previous not so bad anymore 44 second boot time was even reduced to 35.

But I think that'll eventually change as I continually use MacBook Mini on a daily basis, accumulating gunk as I go. However, I really like the feeling of this new start - it's like I've a brand new MacBook Mini! :D

R.I.P.

My MacBook Mini's SD/MMC card reader is dead and yours truly is the culprit. The crime transpired just a little after one o'clock when I plugged in my Sony Ericsson's M2 Memory Stick Adapter into the SD/MMC card slot on my precious and innocent MacBook Mini.



I thought that since I could do this on the MacBook Wind, there shouldn't be any problem but, based on that grounds, I still cannot plead innocent; I should've known there was something amiss when I noticed that plugging in the M2 adapter on the Mini met some resistance (it obviously didn't with the Wind) and just stopped right there and then. But, as if possessed by some dimwitted ogre-like psyche, I forced the card into the slot anyway.

Stupidity. Denseness. Imbecility. Folly.

And now, when I plug in a normal MMC card on the Mini, OS X doesn't mount it anymore - it's as if it hasn't sensed something has been plugged in.

I'm in grief and right now, I think I'm still in the latter parts of the In Denial Stage; I still believe there's hope still since when I go to the BIOS settings, I can still see that "USB: Single Flash" entry under the Boot Options - I'd have to resort to trickery to get to the BIOS with the MMC card in the reader slot though because the Mini would get hung up on the boot splash screen, which, by the way, sports a "Compaq" logo now instead of the stock "HP" one.

But I may be trudging forward to acceptance as I'd already reinstalled the dummy SD/MMC card that came with the Mini.

I still think it was a retarded thing for me to do - does that mean I'm still in the Anger stage then?

Ok, scrap that. But come to think of it; even the MacBook Air in all it's tech-chic glory doesn't even have an SD/MMC slot and, as it is now, my MacBook Mini still trumps it with 2 USB ports vs. 1. :)

HP = Compaq ??

You know you've caught on the real hackintoshing fever when you already have a working OS X installation in your previously just a mere lowly PC; tweaked and modified the system until you've got all the hardware components running - sleep/resume, battery, power management - and, yes, you've even purged your innocent Extensions folder of unnecessary kexts, breaking your system a couple or more times as consequence, just to improve your boot time which you're keeping an eye on (now you need to scroll down when viewing your iPod's stopwatch log list; it's that long already).

Yet you still want more.

And then, one lazy, boring afternoon at the office (because of the recession, clients don't buy your company's product, thereby reducing the projects assigned to employees like you), as you read stuff about - yep, you got it right - hackintoshing, you come across a post in a forum or a webpage containing information on further custom tailor fitting your hackintosh. What happens is, you wind up doing what that post was saying.

Cut the chase and let's just say I got my MacBook Mini as an HP Mini 1000, but because I followed what a certain post on the net said; it now thinks it was a Compaq Mini 700 in its past life before it was reborn to become a MacBook Mini. How come you say? Look at the pic below:

Throwing Out Garbage

Starting hibernating
Sleepimage has garbage
Hibernating failed

After installing PC-EFIv9/Chameleon 10.1.12 over the iDeneb v1.3 default in preparation for updating my MacBook Mini, I started getting these weird messages which show up after Darwin loads and OS X is about to boot. Although it didn't have impact on the performance whatsoever of my hackintosh setup, it would nice to be able to eliminate it just the same. Here's how you do it:

Take Root

Coming from a Linux background, I've long wondered if the root user concept also exists in Mac OS X - it's Unix after all and Linux is Unix like. There's gotta be some common ground between the two, right?

Hackintoshing involves lots of googling and following how-to's and such; one time I encountered reading "log in as root and copy the file in your root folder".

Okay, so there's this root user after all in Mac OS X. I already know that logging in as root is possible, I'll just have to type in "root" as my username and then type in my root password - wait a second; "my root password"?

I did configure my account, designating a custom username and password, during Mac OS X Setup Assistant after initial install but I don't reckon being prompted to specify a password for the root.

Thinking maybe I could look it up in System Preferences > Accounts, I was confused big time when I didn't find anything there that said "root". What am I supposed to do now? Turns out, this is what I should do:

Lessons Learned

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:

What's Happened to the MacBook Wind?

These past few weeks, I find myself more and more enamored with the HP Mini 1000 - or my MacBook Mini, spending less and less time with the MacBook Wind (see, I even dropped the possessive adjective "my" there) to devote it instead to my MacBook Mini. Heck I even endure sacrificing my own cells' well-being by not sleeping during the cell regeneration hours - 10pm - 1am - just to tinker with my (yes, "my") MacBook Mini.

If there's anything to prove how hooked I am and committed to my MacBook Mini, the screenshot below suffices: