Back In My Mini 1001TU's Arms

It's been exactly 16 days since that fateful night that my Mini 311 got bricked. And that's also how long I've been living with my Mini 1001TU for survival. Imagine how pitiful I could've been without a laptop of my own!

Ok, the HP Mini 311 is still a netbook technically and so is the Mini 1001TU. But the last "real" laptop I had was an 12" IBM Thinkpad A21e:

Obviously, the image above is not an actual picture of the machine I owned (credits to netlabs.net). True, I was madly in love with that Thinkpad as it was the first laptop I bought with my own money (about the same amount I paid for my MSI Wind back then) but its charms weren't quite enough to send me into shutterbug fits like my dear netbooks did. Actually, the habit started with the Mini 1001TU which remains a gorgeous piece of gadgetry to this day in my own opinion. 

And by the way, my A21e had a 700MHz Celeron CPU, 12" LCD screen, 20 GB hard drive, and 256MB SD-RAM.

The point is, judging from my computing habits and from my portable computer history, my requirements are pretty basic. In fact, my EeePC 701 which now belongs to my cousin, with its 900MHz CPU can still fill my plate quite adequately in terms of performance. I can hardly imagine why 900MHz would choke up on blogger.com anyway. In fact, if not for the agonizingly minuscule screen and keyboard of that very first netbook, we would still be together now. Since then I've progressed gradually to an 8.9 incher in the form of the EeePC 900, next to 10 inchers like the MSI Wind and then HP Mini 1001TU. My first HP Mini hit the sweet spot for me in terms of keyboard typing experience but I still got the Mini 311 for the larger screen mainly - Ion and Atom N280 were merely icing on top of the cake.

A large keyboard and a comfortable 11.6" LCD screen with 1366x768 resolution in a package less than 1.5 kg spell nirvana for me.

Thinking back to the days gone by with the Thinkpad A21e and comparing the experience with my 10" netbooks, I've come to realize that it's actually the vertical screen real estate that breaks and makes the deal for me; I was content with the A21e because it had 768 vertical pixels. 1024 pixels horizontal is fine by me but not that "600" part of the equation. Sends shivers up my spine.

And then I am suddenly forced to go back to the quagmires of 1024x600.

On to the meatier OSx86 related stuff. It turns out I'm not the only one who's unhappy with the 600 vertical pixels - Mac OS X doesn't really dig that resolution config as proven by windows cutting past below the dock (already set to auto hide, mind you). And one particular app that just stands out in its obvious disgust of that shortage in vertical pixel real estate is (drum roll please):

GarageBand '09

I posted about this problem before and in the end, was just resigned to reverting to GarageBand '08 which though still didn't quite dig the 600 vertical pixels, allowed me to move its window around the screen, similar to "panning" movement and thus gain access to those control buttons at the bottom. GarageBand '09 in contrast just wouldn't budge - no panning and certainly just pissed me off when it refused to show me its bottom panel controls despite of how small I made its scale factor.

As I've said, I'm no great musician but I do fiddle with GarageBand once in a while and because I've OCD (or at least, I think I have it), being aware of this little glitch just cannot give me peace. But thankfully (another drum roll please) Zooom comes to the rescue!

image from coderage.com

The app can be downloaded for a 30-day trial period and a license can be had for $19.95 USD.

Zooom is Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10/6) compatible and is very easy to adapt to. There's even a demo that'll help you get acquainted with the key strokes for moving windows around, resizing windows and maximizing them the unconventional way - that is, in relation to the Mac OS X conventional way of course.

So give it a try or you might even wanna consider shelling out $19.95. I imagine it's gonna be a whole lot useful for those of you who have 1024x600 hackintoshed netbooks so that $20 bucks is money well spent. Hopefully I get back my Mini 311 before the 30-day trial period expires.

P.S. Coderage did not pay nor ask me to promote their app so don't feel all weird reading gooey, cheesy, marketing-like stuff like these on my blog - it's not the first time I did something like this. In fact, I seem to be in the habit of advertising stuff here and there without as much as a dime or cent to my name. Well this whole "HP Mini" mania is evident on this blog anyway hahaha.

Oh and though I do not condone software piracy, if you're on for a little easter-egg-hunting, you can check out my mediafire account for little Zooomy little present. ;) 

Working With EFI

from rockia.com

To those who've been reading My MacBook Mini for quite some time, you know how I'm crazed up about the EFI boot method. True, there are other boot methods that are available to the OSx86 community and are wonderful projects. One of them is Netbook Installer (NetbookBootMaker) which is a hit among the masses as it's enabled even the totally inexperienced noob to easily create their own Mac Netbooks.

But I still prefer EFI. Why? In essence, its logic is simple : put all necessary files in a single location that is hidden - the 200 MB partition that is created when you partition a hard drive as GUID, default native partition for Snow Leopard installation.

In hackintosh setups of days gone by, the addtional OSx86 stuff are integrated into the Mac OS X file system - you've got occult-sounding non Apple native kexts inside /System/Library/Extensions. Or you have Apple native kexts that are modified and shoved back into that aforementioned location. While that worked, the result is that those modified kexts that originate from Apple native ones and hence carried the same name, would get over-written when a point update is installed on the system. This had been the cause for many broken hackintosh setups after a major OS update.

In time the trend moved on to having an "Extra" folder in / where all additional OSx86 stuff are placed. What happened is that this Extra folder would sometimes get accidentally deleted unwittingly and result to a broken system. Then this Extra would then get to be hidden - a technique that is used up to now by Netbook Installer.

But, someone thought (sorry I don't remember anymore the name) to just put this Extra stuff inside that invisible 200 MB partition which is a very safe location. The EFI partition.

With all the non Apple elements tucked away in the EFI partition, the "Vanilla" system came to be. Essentially, there are no changes done on the main OS X file system. One can, in theory, even just put the hard drive in a real Mac and it would work fine since no foreign kexts are installed in /System/Library/Extensions.

What I personally like about EFI is its transparency: I get to have full control of what gets installed in my system. I've never liked that "ramdisk' creeping up on me like a ghost that's hard to get rid once installed in my hard drive,

Anyway, let's get on to more relevant part.

The EFI partition is a hidden partition and that fact adds to its complexity. It's not as readily accessible as a hidden Extra folder in /. You gotta mount and unmount it when you wanna make changes - a process that noobs don't particularly like and end up whining and forums where they get flamed by the big guys. (Poor noobs - I can relate cause I've gotten my fair share of being flamed and flaming others, the latter I avoid as much as possible).

Setting up an EDI config for the Mini 1000 is already made simple by the installer I created. Run it and voilà! EFI is setup. Now what happens if you wanna do some changes like installing uninstalling kexts?

I know that you'd rather not learn Terminal stuff but I'm not willing to enslave myself by committing to releasing one-click (or several clicks) GUI installers for you each and every time you want to mod EFI. Thus, let me empower you with a tool that I use myself on my Mini 1000:

Update EFI

I did not make this applet. It's not open source but it's free as long as you give praise to Dalton who made it. So there.

Anyway, using the app is fairly simple. Launch it, type your password. It'll mount EFI. Delete or drag-drop kexts inside Extra/Extensions folder inside, it'll rebuild the mkext for you and also unmount EFI.

You have basically 2 options:

1. Basic Changes - for adding kexts
2. OS Updates - does what Basic Changes does but also gets the latest graphics kexts (if the update installs newer graphics kexts) and patches them. This is for IntelGMA950 users.

Give it a shot. It's really simple and easy to use that creating a how-to would just vulgar manifest of imbecility,

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.