Random Hackintosh Thoughts : /System/Library/Extensions/

In the history of hackintoshes and real Macs alike, this location inside your OS X installation volume is highly crucial. It's where those kexts, if you still didn't know by now, that make the hardware work with Mac OS X - roughly the equivalent of drivers in the alternate reality that is Windows at least for us Mac-heads and Hack-heads - reside.

Of course, the stock or more popularly called "Vanilla" kexts installed by default by a Mac OS X Retail Install Disc, do not include the special kexts that your PC's hardware needs to work. Now in the early days of OSx86 (ok, maybe not so early since it's hardly 2 years ago from now), the main thing were custom distros like iDeneb, Kalyway, etc., and special kexts like AppleDecrypt.kext, Brcm4315Injector.kext, etc., used to be installed directly to /System/Library/Extensions/ folder

While this is good and works, take for example the AppleIntelGMA950.kext customized to support your graphics was overwritten by an OS update, say 10.6.4 - the customizations are not in the new AppleIntelGMA950.kext installed by the update.

Ok, so how about naming these custom-built hackintosh kexts in way that they don't coincide with the stock ones to avoid over-writing? That does also work. One good example are the Voodoo kexts - VoodooHDA.kext, VoodooPS2Controller.kext etc.

But then again, we do have such a thing as a "kext conflict"; one kext may not bear to live with another and thus cause a Kernel Panic which has become, at one point or another, our BFF. Or perhaps the newer kernel itself is not compatible with the kext; example are previous SleepEnabler.

The only solution to that would be to take out the kexts and get on with life. However, you cannot boot our OS X installation to delete those problematic kexts; they're installed in /System/Library/Extensions are loaded whether you like it or not. We can perhaps extract the physical hard drive and connect it to a working Mac externally via USB and get at those kexts from there - but that's not a luxury that most have  for a troubleshooting option.

Enter a newer era of hackintosh/OSx86: "Extra" folder in the main "/" directory. Where we put all those non-vanilla kexts in isolation so that the main OS X system remains untouched which can still be booted using Boot-132 discs containing a set of "working kexts".

And then people got even more obsessed by this Vanilla system and discovered that the installation can be made even "purer" by moving the "Extra" folder with all those OSx86 kexts, still in the same physical hard drive, but in a different partition - the EFI partition. This is hidden and by default not even mounted and so the possibility of OS updates reaching it is practically zilch. A user must consciously mount EFI before he/she can gain access to the precious files in there that make your hackintosh work - it's something, at least in the beginning, done only via Terminal/command line which can be intimidating. He/she must have know what he/she was doing.

That said, EFI boot method, still is NOT totally immune to updates. The rule of the thumb is to determine beforehand which of your "working kexts" can possibly cause trouble with the update in question. The action plan therefore is to update these set of kexts - delete or add - before restarting the machine after the applying an OS point update.

And so how do you know which kexts will cause trouble and which new kexts to update EFI with? Enter Hackintosh/OSx86 addicts. It can be because they don't have better things to do or they probably just don't have a life at all (*ahem*) but to tinker and so are very much willing to make their systems guinea pigs. And this is where an active community of people who have the same hardware as yours or close enough to yours (and preferably are Hackintosh/OSx86 addicts) is vital. If not, you're still not as hopelessly out of luck as you think you are cause hey, you can always learn. Being a Hackintosh noob is not bad at all - it's a start to wonderful OSx86 things and more.

So what have I been smoking that incited this imaginary dialogue? All that in a post to come.

How To Live With 1024x600 Screen Resolution

Although I didn't get my HP Mini 311 back this week, I'm still hoping I'll be getting it back within next week. My target is Tuesday but in the remaining days between now and that fateful day, I still have to live with the 1024x600 screen of my HP Mini 1000.

Computing with a hackintoshed netbook with this screen resolution is bearable, even quite good in fact. Although the netbooks' Intel Atom chip hardly trumps a G4 PowerPC in iBooks, the fact that the former can run Snow Leopard and are lighter, more portable than the latter is enough for me to prefer hackintoshed netbooks than real iBooks.

So using hackintoshed netbooks on a daily basis spells happy days. Err, until you find yourself with lots of open apps and open windows. That 600 vertical real estate has forced me to put my Dock vertically on the left side for more comfortable workspace.

There was this one time that I had activated Spaces to organize my open windows but then they're not that many and I find myself getting confused with where to find each one. This wasn't the solution for me, clearly.

And then I stumbled upon an article in OS X Daily; "Enable Single Application Mode". And before you react violently, NO, this is not anything like Windows XP Starter Edition, but rather it "is a way to force Mac OS X to show only the application that is currently in use, all other open applications and windows will be minimized into the Dock. Selecting another application from the Dock will then minimize the current application, and the new selection becomes the only thing on screen."

Here's what it looks like in action:


It kinda reminds me of Ubuntu Netbook Remix's behavior, which is quite nice. :)

Yours truly, smbios.plist

My Mini 311-1002TU is taking a 2-3 week sabbatical (actually I'm risking 4 weeks to a bit more than a month) but obviously I cannot not blog. Like one blogger I really like reading, I blog because I think everyone is entitled to my opinion. I'm talkative that way. Imagine living within 2 meters in proximity of me. Correct, it'll drive you nuts.

So I cannot be stopped writing. Since I can't participate in any testing for the HP Mini MacBook Pro 311 and thus unable to write about that specific netbook, I figured I'll write about something that's generic OSx86. And I definitely think it'll benefit those who've actually turned this personal blog into a Technical Support Page. ;-)

Let's get to one question that was posted on my Cbox (no, I've no intentions of answering if a huawei xxx 3g USB dongle would work in OS X Snow Leo because I don't have that hardware the Huawei E1550 usb dongle modem works as per hyunlee :)); I'm referring rather, to this one:

hyunlee: hi guys, how do i change the serial no.?

The quick answer: Edit your smbios.plist.

Before I spill the beans and tell you which to edit in that file, allow me to share some useful (I hope) knowledge; What is smbios.plist?

Back in my early noob days, the only way I could experience OSx86/hackintosh is via custom distro's like iDeneb, Kalyway, and MSIWindOSX. In short, I had absolutely no idea what went under the hood that enabled mere third world mortal like me to taste the joy that is OS X and the beauty that is Aqua.
To give you a clearer picture of my pre-homo sapiens sapiens days, these are the questions that normally coursed through my mind as I watch my hackintoshed netbooks boot in verbose mode:

"What the bullocks does 'jettisoning kernel linker' mean?"

Not that I now know how jettisoning the kernel linker in OS X 10.5 Leopard really does - I still have absolutely no idea about that - but I've had a handful of epiphany that helps me from posting "stupid questions" being flamed in forums where the big guys are.

One of them is a component called the smbios.plist


 It's not just for editing the Serial No., that bit of information you see when you go check Apple menu > About this Mac > More info...(System Profiler). It's part that and a lot lot more.

Consider this scenario:

While I was still booting iDeneb OS X Leopard on my HP Mini 1001TU, I had to hack my DVDPlayback framework so I could DVDPlayer with an external DVD drive. And then I dutifully bought a legal shrink-wrapped copy of Snow Leopard DVD from PowerMac Center in Greenbelt 3 and upgraded my Mini MacBook following one of the guides I unearthed with patient Googling (you should all try Googling folks, it's an intelligent way to live in the OSx86 community). And what do you know? I fired up DVDPlayer and found out that even without that hack, it launched fine - and even without an external DVD drive! I was absolutely amazed!

A miracle!

No.

It was just that one of the files I downloaded to setup my boot configuration for Snow Leo then included this smbios.plist that contained values that transformed my HP Mini 1001TU into a MacBook Air in the eyes of Snow Leopard.

I had "Remote Disc" automatically displayed in my Finder Sidebar.

The icon for my HP Mini 1001TU was a tiny MacBook Air.

Real MacBook Airs don't have an internal DVD drive so it's natural that OS X should allow DVDPlayer to launch fine without that peripheral. It was all too obvious but I, the unsuspecting noob, didn't notice it of course.

So here's how you edit your smbios.plist to get that Serial No. fixed (EFI boot):
1) First access the EFI partition. This you can do by mounting the EFI partition manually or just use Alter EFI v1.3 > Edit Others
2) Open the file "smbios.plist" (it's located inside Extra folder) with your favorite text editor (mine is TextWrangler) and look for this key/string combination:

CODE: SELECT ALL

<key>SMserial</key>
<string>W88033AKY51</string>

The serial no. goes into the string field. You can go mimic a real existing MacBook Air, or create your own Mac serial.
3) Save your changes.
4) Umount EFI (click "Done" if you're using Alter EFI)
Note that the changes you made are applied after a reboot.

Snow Leopard 10.6.3 on the HP Mini 1000

UPDATE (09/03/2010): There were still issues with 10.6.3 and I never go to sort them out. Now, I no longer have my HP Mini 1000 with me. My recommendation is to stick with 10.6.2 at the highest version with this guide for best results.

I admit that I've been neglecting the HP Mini 1000, my very first MacBook Mini. It was borked out for a period of time and was just recently resurrected from the land of the dead. But I still haven't played with it for quite a while - never had the patience to figure why it wouldn't sleep in 10.6.3.

Good thing a forumer named lollipop from the myhpmini.com Mac OS X forums has been keeping the "project" alive (I'm now used to calling Mac OS X efforts on specific netbook builds as "projects" because of the HP Mni 311 Darwin Project). It'a very good guide for updating to 10.6.3 but we can take it another route; EFI Boot.

To understand why the obsession with EFI boot method, click here; also aside from being EFI, with this guide, we won't be using any modified/hacked mach_kernel as we're gonna use a version of Chameleon bootloader that auto-patches the kernel for us on the fly during boot up.

This means we can get our Mini 1000's Atom processor pass of as valid Mac Intel procies for use with Mac OS X and avoid the dreaded "boot loop" while using original mach_kernel - one less thing to worry about in future updates.

So without further ado, here's Snow Leopard 10.6.3 on the HP Mini 1000 à la LeMaurien19 :D

What You Need:
1. USB flashdrive or external hard drive - at least 8GB
2, .Snow Leopard Retail DVD (dmg or .iso or .cdr)
3. A working Mac or hackintosh
4. NetbookBootMaker 0.8.3 (we're still using v0.8.3 because 0.8.4 is still in Release Candidate version)
5. MacOSX10.6.2ComboUpdt.dmg (we're NOT using the v1.1 update as that version may cause WiFi probs more this only refers to connection quality issues, if your Mini does not have a Snow Leo compatible card, this unrelated to that) *Apparently, 10.6.3 Combo Update which is not v1.1 is no longer available, please update to 10.6.2 first and then update again to 10.6.3 again later if you insist on getting the non v1.1 10.6.3 update
6. HP Mini 1000 EFI Auto Setup for 10.6.3 (HP Mini 1000 EFI Auto Setup for 10.6.3 is compatible with 10.6.2)

What To Do:
A. Create your bootable USB installer:

1. With your USB drive plugged in and a copy of an image of Snow Leo Retail DVD handy, launch Disk Utility which can be found in Applications > Utilities.
2. Click on USB drive from the list at the left panel and format it as "Mac OS Extended Journaled". You can name it anything you want but for this guide, we're gonna name it "SnowDVD"
3. Click on the "Restore" tab. You should see 2 fields on that tab's panel: "Source" and "Destination". Drag the "SnowDVD" volume you just formatted and drop it to "Destination" box. Drag the "Snow Leopard Retail DVD" to "Source" box.  (If the Snow Leopard Retail DVD image is not listed at the left panel of Disk Utility, simply drag it to that panel)
4. Uncheck option "Erase destination" (so as not to overwrite name "SnowDVD" for the USB) and then click on Restore button. If Disk Utility gives an error message, it's most likely that the Snow Leopard Retail DVD image has not been scanned for restore.  You scan the image by high-lighting the image from the left panel list, then on Disk Utility's menubar, click on Images > Scan Image for Restore... 
5. Once Snow Leo Retail DVD has been restored onto the USB drive, launch NetbookBootMaker and apply it to "SnowDVD" volume.                                                                     We're almost done but we have to do one thing more to make the installation process smooth.
6. Press Command+Shift+G and go to location "/Volumes/SnowDVD/System/Installation/Packages". Delete "OSInstall.pkg" and rename "OSInstall.pkg.orig" into "OSInstall.pkg" - just delete the ".orig" portion of the filename. You now have a bootable USB installer.

B. Install Snow Leopard on the HP Mini 1000

1. With the bootable USB Installer plugged into one of the USB ports, turn on the HP Mini 1000 and press on F9 to get to the boot menu.
2. Choose your USB device from the list and press Enter.
3. You will get to the Mac OS X Installer program; after choosing your language, go to the menubar and click on Utilities > Disk Utility
4. Look at the left panel and click once on your Mini 1000's internal hard disk to highlight it. And then, at the right panel, click on Partition. You should click once on the main topmost drive icon for this to work, and not on any sub volume/partition.                 
5. For "Volume Scheme" choose "1 partition". For "Volume Information", name it "Macintosh HD" (like in real Macs :D). For "Format" choose "Mac OS Extended Journaled".
6. Click on "Options..." button below Volume Scheme block and in the dialog sheet that will appear, choose "GUID partition table". Click on OK.
7. Back at the main Disk Utility window, click on "Apply" button at the bottom to format your hard drive, ready for Snow Leopard. 
8. Once done, quit Disk Utility.app and proceed to Snow Leopard installation. Choose your newly formatted "Macintosh HD" as installation drive. You can also customize which packages get to be installed by clicking on the "Customize" button. At this point, you know what to do. :D
9. The entire installation will take quite a while - take a walk, watch TV, get some coffee - you can leave your machine while it installs OS X but remember to have it plugged to electric source to avoid battery draining out before the install finishes. Also at the end of installation, you'll get an "Installation Failed" error message. This is normal, it just means the hard drive is not bootable - yet well get to that later. But Snow Leopard is indeed installed on your hard drive, don't worry, so just ignore the error message and restart your machine.

C. Initial Boot, Updating to 10.6.3 and EFI Setup

1. With your bootable USB installer still plugged in, turn the HP Mini 1000 and press F9 choose the USB from the boot devices list and press Enter to boot from it.
2. Press any key before "SnowDVD" gets automatically booted up. You'll notice that a "Macintosh HD" has been added as bootable volumes. Use arrow key to highlight "Macintosh HD" and press Enter to boot it up.
3. You'll get into the Mac OS X setup assistant page. Create your User Account as you would on any Mac. At some point, you maybe asked to setup your network, just click on "My computer uses different setting/connects differently" and choose "My computer does not connect to the internet" in the meanwhile. You can configure your network later.
4. Once logged in at the desktop, run the MacOSX10.6.3ComboUpdate installer. You will prompted to restart but DO NOT RESTART YET.
5. Run the HP Mini 1000 EFI Auto Setup for 10.6.3. After that's done, you may now restart your machine.

Congratulations on your new Mini MacBook Air (I had the smbios.plist make your Mini 1000 disguise as a MacBook Air 2,1).

If you get a kernel panic after restarting from C.5, just shutdown your machine and restart again.

What you may notice that the machine may not be able to restart after C.5 when you click on shutdown or restart option. Don't worry, this is fixable. 

Download UpdateEFI v1.3 and click on "Basic Changes". Open a Finder window and click on the "EFI" disk at the sidebar, digg through the folders until you reach /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions. The kexts responsible for shutdown/restart/reboot functionality are:

1. OSXRestart.kext
2. EvoReboot.kext
3. OpenHaltRestart.kext

You can experiment with a combination of these kexts or just replace OSXRestart and EvoReboot with OpenHaltRestart. Click on Finish button on UpdateEFI to update the contents of the EFI partition.

Actually, shutdown/restart is something that is known to be an issue for the HP Mini 1000 since before 10.6.3. What's most important is that there's now finally a resolution to sleep and speedstep after sleep issues.


Will update this post once I figure out the shutdown/restart.


Shutdown/Restart is working fine.

Quartz Extreme For The Rest Of Us

It's been a while since something happened in the HP Mini OSx86 scene, particularly on the older units - Mini 110 and 1000.

A forumer at myhpmini.com, "thebubzie" has been kind enough to package for us an installer for Intel Graphics Media Accelerator. It's been conceived to work on Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard and you can download it here to try it on your own MacBook Mini. No more hunting down those different IntelAppleGMA950 and IntelAppleIntegratedFramebuffer kexts.

Flash Player 10.1 Beta Release

I've always complained about how youtube videos never play quite as nicely in Mac OS X as they do in Windows. In a brief summary, it's always been like watching my fave asian drama uploads in a slow motion of sorts. Unsmooth - if there was ever such a word. Such has been the Mac Snow Leopard experience with Flash Player in Safari 4.

But that's changed. I read an article in Tuaw about the improvements on video playback quality on meager netbook IntelGMA950 (or 945) chips, And what's even more delightful is it brings HD quality video playback on web browsers accessible to the netbook masses. Now I didn't care for HD then since I was already having trouble with the normal video - it'd only mean a more exasperating experience so why bother, anyhow?
Then came this Flash Player 10.1 promise which urged me to try.
First off:

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

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.

Bad Kitty!

That's why I always prefer dogs. Haha.

I was able to download Snow Leopard Beta (the one distributed at the WWDC 2009) and tried my luck on the Mini. Followed this thread and this website - though not to a tee exactly as there were differences in hardware and I was practically stumbling to find my way in the dark.

Win XP was obliterated again from the second partition - 12 GB all in all -  in no time and replaced with Snow Leopard. I ran the OSInstall.mpkg from the .cdr image from within Leopard 10.5.7. It installed fine. But that was that.

Turns out Snowy is one unruly kitty. No, make that one choosy and unruly kitty as it purportedly works ok on the MSI Wind but gives me nothing but KP's (Kernel Panics) from the very start.

Frustration...Frustration...Frustration...

I was even happy to click OK on the license agreement for the seed (see below)

Insecure

Now I don't exactly know if that's how you write the word to describe a computer that's not secure. But I do  know that's how one girl I know felt after watching Transformes: Revenge of the Fallen (does Megan Fox really have to wear real skimpy shorts while drawing on the motor bike and do her lips need to be in perpetual pout, even when in the desert and Decepticons were trying to kill her and Shia Labeouf's characters? Hahaha)

These days, my MacBook Mini's becoming well integrated with my daily computing experience. That is, I find less and less things to tweak with it - aside from that (a) audio and (b) mic functionality which is still (a) imperfect and (b) not working at all even with VoodooHDA already installed.OpenHaltRestart.kext seems to be acting up still as it occurs sometimes that MacBook Mini fails to complete the Restart process.

All in all, I think I'm reaching a plateau here. I've just done the fan tweak and so far so good - no major catastrophes whatsoever and congratulations to me by the way: it's been a month and a half since the last time I did a "wipe-out, reinstall" on MacBook Mini - the longest period I've gotten so far with the same installation! Hurray! I'd have gladly credited it all to a substantially improving emotional quotient, leveraging mainly on patience but I'd have to admit that it's just that work has been busy lately.

So what am I posting about this time?

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:

Custom Tailor Hackintoshing

Hackintoshing the HP Mini 1000 is very much like "déjà vu" for me; a lot of the tweaks I did were stuff I'd already done on the MSI Wind hackintosh. And then the last couple of months endless tweaking and one of the consequences thereof is reinstallation/back to zero (in fact, the OS X installation I'm currently running on MacBook Mini is about the 17th reinstallation; it's been up 2 weeks straight, I hope it lasts - even for a just a whole month at least ^_^*); I've gotten a more or less clear idea of how I want my OS X to be:

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

iWork '09

Being a windows user, I'm used to Microsoft Office and it's the first set of apps that I installed in my MacBook Mini to get productive. I don't know if it's just the MacBook Mini's fault (not enough ooomph) but Office:Mac 2008 is like Molasses. See vid below, showing how long Word:Mac 2008 takes to launch:

Plus I totally don't buy the "Ribbons" thing; for netbooks with limited screen space, this would only eat up what valuable little vertical LCD real estate you've got.

From the previous Mac World conference video when iWork '09 was introduced, Philip Schiller's demo of iWork '09 piqued my interest. And so, given that the only apps installed on my MacBook Mini that came from Microsoft is Office:Mac 2008 , I thought I'd dump Redmond for good and go South à la Pomme all the way.

Function Key

For some reason, sleep/resume has never been a problem for me with Mac OS X Leopard on the HP Mini 1000 and even after updating to 10.5.7 a couple of weeks back, it's still working great as always.

And then I discovered something that made me more in awe of the beauty and gorgeousness that is the MacBook Mini! I can go put the machine to sleep by pressing Fn + F1. Of course I can still just choose to close the lid and off to dreamland it'll go.

Another Fn + F1 will wake the Mini up :D

Pressing any key will wake the Mini up.

For hackintoshes, laptop hackintoshes more specifically, the Fn combo keys usually make one of the big problems in terms compatibility. For example, when I started off with iDeneb 10.5.5, installing the IntelGMA950 kexts would indeed put my screen on the right 1024 x 600 resolution but it would mean losing the ability to use the brightness controls (Fn + F3/F4) . So knowing that Fn + F1 sleep works is a comfort.

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. :)