Tag Archives: MacOS

[OSX86] Building a Hackintosh with ProQ’s AnyOS Motherboard

motherboard back

Prolegomena

With all those different Apple Computers available like Mac Mini’s, Mac Book Air’s, Mac Pro’s, why the hell should we consider setting up a hackintosh these days, since a Mac Mini comes at a price tag of only 600€ here in Europe?

Well the answer to this is quite simple. Hackintoshs aim at people who are basically interested in understanding and tweeking. If you just wanna use you Mac for Mails and a bit of internet-surfing a hackintosh is most likely the wrong thing for you.

But if you are artist for instance, dealing with audio- or video-editing a hackintosh definitely comes a lot more handy than an original Mac. The reason is simple: original Macs have become a lot less flexible when it comes to manual hardware upgrading during the last eight years. Let’s take the latest Mac Pro for instance. The design is still outstanding, but this design comes at the price that Apple entirely dropped the PCIe Bus architecture. What means, that we cannot use dedicated DSP, soundcards or videocards in that device anymore and need to switch to Firewire or Thunderbolt solutions. Which is an additional economical strain. Continue reading

[Bitwig] The Platform-Independent DAW Is Out NOW

bitwig-logo-screen2One of the most promising tools of the last view years – the platform independent DAW Bitwig Studio has eventually been released yesterday. It is available for MacOS, Windows and Linux. Bitwig is a Berlin based company, originally founded by former Ableton developers. The relation to Ableton is something that put the expectations of Bitwig to a comparative high level in the field of DAWs.

We’re gonna check out Bitwig in depth during the next few days and let you know what we think. In the meantime: get yourself a demo run for free. Since the save and export feature is disabled in the normal demo version, we recommend to go for a trial license, which requires registration. Head over to https://www.bitwig.com/en/account/register.html and give the next generation of platform independent DAWs a serious go.

[Win] Oracle VirtualBox: Workaround For Initialization Issue Pt. II

Find our previously released workaround for initialization issues here.

CPU VT-X/AMD-V Issue

After configuring a dual core virtual machine and trying to start you may encounter a message box indicating:

  • Hyper-V launch failed; Either VMX not present or not enabled in BIOS.
  • Hyper-V launch failed; at least one of the processors in the system does not appear to provide a virtualization platform supported by Hyper-V.

This issue may occur no matter which host operating system you’re using. The reason for this might be:

  • you’re not using a CPU that supports hardware virtualization
  • your BIOS does not support hardware virtualization properly
  • hardware virtualization is disabled in your BIOS settings (check it!)
  • there is a bug in your current BIOS version
  • the trusted execution flag prevents booting properly

Known Workarounds

Try these settings in your BIOS:

  • Enable Execute Disable bit (depending on the motherboard manufacturer this can be called: XD-Bit, EDB, NX-Bit, AMD EVP)
  • Enable Virtualization bit (depending on the mobo manuf. this can be called: VT, IVT, AMD-V)
  • Enable VT for Direct I/O Access (depending on the mobo manuf. this can be called: VT-d based I/O)
  • Disable Trusted Execution Technology (depending on the mobo manuf. this can be called: Intel TXT, TET)

Of course, upgrading your BIOS to the latest version can also be of help, but flashing the BIOS is always a little risky.

Final Words

As we’re currently using VirtualBox only on the Windows XP platform we categorized this article under Win, anyway it is very likely that the same issue also occurs under Linux or Mac OS, as VirtualBox on all platforms derives from the same source code.

The above settings apply for example for installing MacOS SnowLeopard in a VM under Windows 7 on Gigabyte EP35-DS3 or Dell Optiplex 745/755.

[MacOS] Codeweavers’ Crossover Now With Civilization 5 Support

Wine based Crossover 9.2 now brings Civilization 5 support to the Mac and Linux. Crossover runs flawlessly with Civilization under Snow Leopard and with some minor flaws under Leopard.

Prices

  • Crossover Standard (incl. updates for 6mths): 37€
  • Crossover Professional (incl. updates for 12 mths and incl. Crossover Games) : 64€

Aspyr will release a native Mac version of Civilization 5 before Chrismas. We would not wonder if the Crossover emulated Windows version is more performant than the native Mac version, but let’s see ;-)

[iPhone] ThunderSt0rm is Fake – Don’t Install

According to TheBigBoss.org two tools have appeared on the net:

  • ThunderSt0rm and
  • TurboSn0w

Both of them are fakes and don’t jailbreak the iPhone, the iPod Touch, nor the iPad, but harm your system and delete iTunes files. Thus leaving you with broken installations.

[MacOS] Update 10.6.2 to Break Intel Atom CPU Support

According to Stellarolla’s blog the upcoming Snow Leopard update 10.6.2 and the Leopard update 10.5.9 will most likely break Intel Atom support. Thus rendering hackintosh installations on netbooks inoperable.

Although Apple does not provide products shipping with Intel Atom CPUs, the Mac OS kernel did support those. Now with the growing amount of hackintoshs it seems Apple tries to stop the use of their operating system on cheap an tiny netbooks.

Probably this is another indicator that Apple is going to bring the long rumored tiny tablet Mac. Anyway for people willing to maintain MacOS on their netbooks the easiest way is to not update to 10.6.2 or 10.5.9 at the moment.

» Stellarolla: “10.6.2 kills Atom and other news”…

[MacOS] PearC Clone Supplier admonishs German Blogger

According to the MacNews.de, the Germany based PearC, besides Psystar the second supplier of Mac clones, admonished the operator of the german blog Caf’é Digital. Café Digital reported about legal concerns of selling ready made Mac clone hardware with pre-installed Mac OS.

For their report, Café Digital used a modified PearC logo and told certain facts, PearC obviously did not want to read in the public. Sadly there is no information about the now censored parts of the Café Digital article about PearC.

We strongly recommend not to use any ready made clone hardware. As all these clone manufacturers are using solutions developed by the InsanelyMac and Hackint0sh community. You may check our EPOS I. installation script – which is provided for educational and for solely non commercial purposes.

If you can not set up a clone Mac yourself, get yourself an original Mac. For most of our every day life’s purposes a (refurbished) Mac Book should be sufficient.

» PearC Germany
» Café Digital

» Apple Store Germany (refurbished units)…
» Apple Store U.S. (refurbished units)…
» Apple Store U.S. (clearance units)…
» Apple Store U.K. (refurbished units)…

[MacOS] BluRay eventually coming to the Mac?

Together with the newly seeded iPhone OS 3.0 a new iTunes 8.2 has been seeded to developers aswell. MacRumors now posted a screenshot that includes reference to BluRay support.

As Apple currently does not support BluRay this step is overdue anyway as Microsoft Windows user can play BluRay movies on their computers for the last three years.

If this is true this is good news. We dual booters won’t need to start Windows when willing to play an HD movie.

The picture is courtesy of MacRumors

[News] UltraEdit for MacOS and Linux in Alpha Testing

Many Windows users say this is the best editor in the world. Mac Switchers always said they were desperately searching for something like it, but we did not find it. As we are long time UltraEdit users this is good news, as we will not need to run UltraEdit in Codeweaver’s Crossover anymore. Anyway there is no information about the release date for Linux or MacOS. Only the Windows version 15 will be released April 15th, 2009.

As you can see from the screenshot, it looks like UltraEdit for windows, but it is the Windows version. We expect this to be a commercial Crossover/Wine porting. Rewriting of the whole code would simply be too expensive.

The picture is courtesy of IDM Computer Solutions. Find more pictures on their site…

[MacOS] Apple recommends using Virus Scanners

Apple has released a technical note recommending the use of Mac antivirus software. For the first time Apple admits that Macs need protection like other operating systems aswell. Apple recommends three Anti Virus solutions:

The open source virus scanner ClamXav is not mentioned. Besides the major players Symantec and McAfee we can hope that Kaspersky also ports a version of their Anti Virus software soon. Or as Apple says:

“Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”