Tag Archives: efi

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

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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 →

[MacOS] Save Energy by Using Deep Sleep aka Hibernation

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Looking at the situation in Japan at these days, it seems overdue to begin worrying about all our energy consuming devices.

As a MacOS user we are used to some quite convenient features. Like just clicking sleep and the system goes to sleep.

What most of us don’t realize at this point is, that sleep mode logically requires energy as it will immediately wake up when I hit the keyboard.

So for me this began causing me a bad conscious – until I found the way to hibernate MacOS also on desktops

How to Hibernate aka Deep Sleep

  1. Download Axonic Labs’ Deep Sleep Widget for Snow Leopard 10.6 here.
  2. Unpack by double clicking
  3. Install to
    /Library/Widgets
  4. open terminal and
  5. enter in terminal:
    sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

Step 5. because Hibernation Safe Sleep is disabled by default on desktop systems like iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Pro’s.

By the way: first tests show that this Deep Sleep Widget is at least compatible to Chameleon EFI RC4 :-))

[MacOS] Chameleon On USB: Mounting USB Stick Correctly

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Inserting USB sticks to your Mac OS X based system makes Mac OS X mount the stick without assigning certain permissions like owners, or groups.

I. How things get mounted on Mac OS

The mount command on the terminal returns most likely some lines, like that:

  • testuser$ mount
  • /dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
    devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
    map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
    map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
    /dev/disk3s1 on /Volumes/CHAMBOOT (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled, noowners)
    /dev/disk1s4 on /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

You can see quite a lot of slices (i.e. ~partitions) are mounted to that system I am running here. For instance disk1s4 is the forth slice of disk1 and it countains an image of a Mac OS X Install DVD. And you can see a CHAMBOOT named drive mounted with several options.

II. Mount Options/Permissions

Our beloved USB stick named CHAMBOOT (contains Chameleon and) is disk3s1 and is mounted to /Volumes/CHAMBOOT. Mac OS handles USB mounting for most of our every day life operations fairly reliable. But this comes at a cost, as this simplicity is achieved here by applying options like nosuid and noowners during the mount process.

For people willing to run Chameleon from a USB stick permissions are inevitable, as for instance an Extensions.mkext kextcache can only be generated with proper file permissions being set.

II. Mounting USB with permissions

This just requires some simple mount operations being performed manually on the terminal. Do the following:

  • testuser$ sudo -s
    Become ultimate root now.
  • testuser$ cd
    Get back to the home folder whereever you’ve been before.
  • testuser$ sync
    Force completion of pending disk writes.
  • testuser$ umount -f /Volumes/CHAMBOOT
    This unmounts the USB stick called CHAMBOOT
  • testuser$ mkdir chamboottemp
    Create a temporary folder for our mounting session
  • testuser$ mount_hfs /dev/disk3s1 chamboottemp/
    Mount the USB stick to the temporary folder
  • testuser$ mount
    See how the drives are mounted now
  • /dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
    devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
    map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
    map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
    /dev/disk3s1 on /Users/admin/chamboottemp (hfs, local, journaled)
    /dev/disk1s4 on /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)    You can see the USB stick is now mounted without “extra” options.

Now you can apply changes to the USB stick’s files in the proper manner (like copying files, repairing permissions and creating a kextcache). After having performed all the changes, you can correctly unmount. Read here:

III. Manually Unmounting

  • testuser$ cd
    Get back to the home folder whereever you’ve been before.
  • testuser$ umount -f chamboottemp
    Force to unmount the device mounted to the chamboottemp folder now.
  • testuser$ rmdir chamboottemp
    It is safe to delete the chamboottemp folder now.

IV. Links

» Mac OS X Reference Library: Man Page for “sync”…
» Mac OS X Reference Library: Man Page for “mount”…
» AsereBln.BlogSpot.com: Some terminal work…

[MacOS] Update 10.6.2 to Break Intel Atom CPU Support

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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] Psystar Release Rebel EFI

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As of yesterday the notorious Mac Clone manufacturer Psystar has released a commercial software called Rebel EFI. Rebel EFI prepares a normal PC to allow for the installation of Mac OS.

After downloading Rebel EFI,

[..] users simply insert a retail copy of the Snow Leopard DVD, follow the installation procedures and then install the application. The application automatically detects connected devices and downloads the appropriate drivers.

Rebel EFI features Psystar’s DUBL (Darwin Universal Boot Loader) and a Safe Update mode, that prevents users from installing updates that could break their systems. The Safe Update mode only installs Psystar approved updates.

In contrast to the EFI-X manufacturers, Psystar in the past has released several drivers for free to the OSX86 scene. The advantage of Rebel EFI in contrast to solutions like the Chameleon boot is that is already comes with an automized hardware detection and a bunch of downloadable hardware drivers. Chameleon on the other hand is available free of charge and a lot more powerful for users in the know. So decide for yourself which product fits your needs the best.

A single license for Rebel EFI costs about 50US$ and can be ordered here.

rebelefi_hardware

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