Geekbench Results (or Another Reason Why the HP Mini 311 Should Never Be a MacBook Air 2,1)

The image above shows the HP Mini 311's Geekbench results while it camouflages as a MacBook5,1. As you well know, I've been experimenting with various MacBook models to see which ones work with vanilla AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext + HPET + P-States in DSDT; in short what the current HP Mini 311 Darwin Project uses. It has been reported that MacBookAir1,1 just won't work with this setup and MacBookPro5,1 (current HPM311DP default) and MacBook6,1 (theproto HPM311DP default - before vanilla AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement).

MacBookAir2,1 as I've mentioned works, albeit with a noticeable limitation - no SpeedStep, but works nevertheless compared to its sibling the MacBookAir1,1 which won't even boot up the system; i.e. Kernel Panic galore.

However, by running Geekbench on some MacBook models I've been testing, another "anomalie" as the French would call it, appears to be distinctive to the MacBookAir2,1.

It gives a much lower Geekbench result than any other MacBook model. Almost cuts the score in half! All the other models could easily surpass the 1000 score mark, but the Air2,1 tops at 666 and hitting its lowest at 613 (it's one devilishly poor score alright)

See my Geekbench results page for more details. And P.S, I think I do have the sense to make sure Geekbench was the only app running during the tests. :-)

A Typical Hackintosher's Saturday

or lack of a social life.

This not-so-hackintosh-noob is skipping M.A. school today because she accidentally rubbed some insect repellant lotion on her right eye last night and right now she looks like a pirate, or pirate-esse (if ever such a word existed) with one eye barely squinting at her Mini MacBook Pro 311's screen as she composes this post. Alright, that was an exaggeration. The irritation is already abating, hitting its worst last night as she slept at around 2:00 am watching TV. Enough of referring to myself in the third person (I must've been listening to too much podcasts for my M.A. - Antoine Compagnon's lecture at the Collège de France, "Proust, mémoire de la littérature" about narration first person vs third person, the validity and completeness of it).

Back to OSx86.

I gave the Atheros AR5B93 WiFi card I recently bought and destroyed one last chance. And in case you're wondering how I managed to work those tiny U.fl pins and screws, this transpired before the insect repellent lotion incident. The verdict? It's definitive that I've wasted yet another $17. Boot up just won't go past this line:

There's something I learned about this specific WiFi card; aside from it being recognized by Mac OS X 10.6 as AirPort Extreme right out of the box (or anti-static wrap and brown post office envelope), it's driven by the AirPortAtheros21.kext plugin inside of IO80211Family.kext with Dev ID "pci168c,2a". That there, is the exact Dev ID that I got when I inspected the card under Windows XP.

Yes, Windows XP - not on my Mini 311. On my MSI Wind. Yep, although the card would cause Windows 7 on the 311 to freeze, with the Wind, despite the PIN 20 disaster, it doesn't cause any freeze ups on boot. So I guess this means this Atheros card will just have to replace the Wind's aging, not to mention practically unused Realtek card. This will be solace for that act of imbecility.

And since I'm skipping school (my right eye still itches at times and I have to constantly apply hot compress), I thought I'd entertain myself with one of the things I love doing the most: installing Mac OS X. So I've currently transferred my little but very fortunate MSI Wind (much as I begrudge that it seems to be getting all those new hardware) to a larger table to reinstall a dualboot Snow Leopard + Windows 7 setup. I'm putting Win 7 in the first partition to avoid any problem with Chameleon not picking its NTFS formatted volume up at boot.

That's my MacBook Pro 5,1 on the left, and my MacBook 6,1 on the right - once I sort its smbios.plist out after the install and, hopefully, 10.6.4 update are done and over with.

Oh and by the way, since I'm on-line and e-bay is just a click away, I've just had this new Atheros ordered:

Remind me not to get ahead of myself and destroy this one again. Supposing e-bay seller cikeleapple didn't scam me.

I also wish I'd stop sabotaging myself with insect repellant lotion.

Photshroom.com Is Down

and I've a feeling it's gonna stay that way forever. My apologies for posts, especially guides, with missing images. It'll take a long while for me to correct each and every post manually.

New Project That's Not So New

DSDT.
I can't seem to move on from this little pet project, at least until I arrive at a sufficiently tolerable dsdt.aml for use with my HP Mini 1001TU.
In the past, at the forums, we used to get by with commenting out the entire USB method in the dsdt to get sleep but the problem with device removal at each sleep (when you left a flashdrive or iPod plugged in) still remains.
So we're back from the very very short vacation and back to hackintoshing.
How about this one for a fresh new start?

Up Next:

image from mecambiomac.com

A good friend has brilliantly suggested changes to the EFI boot guide; currently in it's latest "revamped" version. The suggestion involves a incorporating the entire EFI setup process into one single script.

We're currently testing how the script works on our separate Mini's to get a picture more or less of how this will fare on other MacBook Mini's out yonder.

Actually I've been using a script I've made myself that configures EFI boot for some time now (ever since I went EFI + Vanilla to be exact) but I just didn't think it was ready for the general others to use as I only had my one MacBook Mini to test it on.

Anyhow, this good friend from the forums has also written a script - a better one than I could ever dream of writing in my lifetime - and we hope to be able to release it together with updated kexts, etc. - the "works", in short, for a new install package and hopefully a new guide as well to get you EFI booting.

If this is successful, then all that needs to be done is to get rid of your terminal-o-phobia and learn how to:
2) "sudo -s"
3) run a script (a file with extension .sh) by dragging and dropping the file icon into a Terminal window and pressing Enter.

What To Do When You Got Kernel Panics

Chances are you've seen this a lot of times in your hackintoshing journey:

Chances are, you've raked the hair on your head a dozen or more painful times in frustration and with the key to the enigma remainin unbeknownst to you; you resort to wiping out your hard drive and reinstall OSx86 - you start from scratch; back to square one.
No, this post does not promise to put an end to all your hackintoshing woes caused by kernel panics but suggests what can constitute a logical way to start troubleshooting your OSx86 system gone berserk.

1) Boot in verbose mode - as if this bit hasn't been the subject of many a noob inquiry, let's explain how does one "boot in verbose mode" exactly?

 You have a bootloader with which you boot into your hackintosh Leopard/Snow Leopard. It can be PC EFI or Chameleon, or Boot Think, or whatever other bootloader iteration you've got. Even if you installed using a custom distro like iDeneb or iAtkos or iPC, etc. and hence cannot remember "installing or configuring any d@mn bootloader" on your machine, you still have a bootloader.

The main point? Know that you can interrupt the bootloader before it, well, loads Mac OS X, by pressing any key on your keyboard before the countdown (set by default to 5) is over. And then, depending on whether you have graphical bootloader enabled or just plain text, (a) you use left and right arrow keys to choose which partition to boot (in case of multiple bootable partitions) and up and down keys to choose "verbose mode"  or (b) you type "-v" at the "boot:" prompt. And press Enter. 

2) Take note of what it says - of course you're not supposed to do an impromptu deciphering of cryptic lines like "MAC Framework successfully initialized using 10485 buffer". This is when the most important hackintosh technique comes in: Patient and intelligent researching. Alright, that was admittedly, putting uncalled for fanfare so "Patient and intelligent googling" then - we didn't drop the word "intelligent"; if you hardly think what you're googling is logical in relation to the issue you're trying to solve, endeavor to be intelligent by being open to bits and pieces of information that fall you way as you research, or google, rather. They're bound to be relevant in your OSx86 life at some point or another.

If things are still awry, try booting with "ignore caches" option or "-x" flag.

Actually, most of the times, a kernel panic is caused by unruly and incompatible kexts that wreak havoc on your system. In which case, you'd intelligently surmise that you need to uninstall those pain in the arse kexts and also, you'd intelligently surmise that you can boot up your vanilla system with an alternative way in form of a USB flashdrive booter which, because it implements a different set of kexts and other configuration files that you've proven to work on your OS X version + machine model, will enable you to get inside your Mac OS X account again.

Finally, you'd intelligently surmise again that you will be taking care of those problematic kexts or config files, like an incomptable dsdt.aml file (whoever promised that an HP Mini 311 dsdt.aml will play 100% well with your 1000 anyway?) while you're logged into your user account. The goal is make your machine able to boot into OSx86 by itself like it used to in the golden days. And for the love of goodness, you'd take at least a mental note of those kexts which cause your OSx86 installation to misbehave. Responsible hackintoshing.

In my case, I still get kernel panics from time to time, even when I didn't do any tinkering with my boot files or kexts. 95% percent of the time, booting in verbose mode sufficed - I am transported to my OSx86 desktop without any problem and the origin of that random "kink" is forever chucked out into obscurity; that is until, perhaps, I dig inside Console.

I find myself unable to complain about kernel panics. Eeven real Macs experience them once in a while.

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:

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