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.

SMBIOS Dilemma

I guess I'm OC; that's just the way I am. That's why I tend to nitpick through every single detail with MacBook Mini. As I'd just finished with dabbling with Snow Leopard - for which experiment MacBook Mini has fallen docilely as prey - I said I'd restart anew. Yep, new install. That's what people with absolutely no life do.

As you see, I've always been wondering why MacBook Wind happily assumes MacBook Air's identity, embracing it as its own while MacBook Mini is a bit confused - ok, make that totally confused. In the past, whenever I checked Apple Menu > About This Mac > More Info . . . and System Profiler launches, it gave me a nonchalant "There was an error while gathering this information" as it highlighted by default the Contents > Hardware main header.

So when I reinstalled iDeneb 1.3 (10.5.5), I made sure I checked the SMBIOS option for a MacBook and true enough, when I checked just before updating to 10.5.7 as per my usual routine, here's what I discovered:

10.5.5 as it is, delivered by iDeneb v1.3 actually can recognize MacBook Mini for what it really is. Even details pertaining to the Processer and Memory are correct. Although when I checked just the "About This Mac", I still got this:

Upon further investigation; I found other tiny details that attest to my MacBook Mini being recognized as a MacBook by OS X:

That's clearly a lappie depicted by the icon there. Now compare it to this (udpated to 10.5.7):

A Mac Pro, so it seems.

Actually, this shouldn't be a problem. But for OC'ness sake, if ever such a word was, I find myself irritated with this. I tried extracting the MacBook SMBIOS from the iDeneb installer and apply it to MacBook Mini again but nothing happens.

I don't know until when I can endure this and continue to just ignore stuff. Honestly, I'm reconsidering editing the DMI/BIOS again; I just have to figure out how to make the Mini be a MacBook without borking out the original HP logo in the boot splash nor getting a painfully slow boot up time.

Decisions, decisions...

Snow Kitty Needs Potty Training

Snow Leopard may be a little wild for MacBook Mini but there's a little ray of hope; at least I could make it boot.

I still followed the same instructions from msiwind.net and osxfujilives but with a "twist" so they say; that is, I had to use the com.apple.Boot.plist from my existing 10.5.7 installation. Plus I did the DSDT patching using the HP Mini (Mac OS X side of course) and just pointed DSDT Patcher to my external HDD from where I was gonna boot Snowy.

First boot: