Tag Archives: Hardware

[MacOS] VirtualBox 3.2 To Support Mac OS Guest on Windows Host [Update]

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We suppose Apple will not like that, but Oracle’s latest version of VirtualBox 3.2 Beta 1 now supports virtualization of Apple’s Mac OS X.

Legal View

Although Apple’s license agreement clearly prohibits installing Mac OS X on other hardware than Apple’s, the screenshot shows that even the Windows version of Mac OS X is prepped to run Mac OS X as guest operating system.

On the other hand Apple’s license agreement is not valid in all countries. It cannot be applied in Germany and some other countries for example.

Technical View

To satisfy Apple’s Aqua binary encryption it is required to supply two operating system decryption keys (OSK0 and OSK1) to the kernel extension “Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext”. Although it is no secret that Mac OS can be run on PC hardware using decryption emulators like netkas’ fakesmc.kext, anyhow at the moment it is unclear if Oracle integrated those operating system decryption keys into VirtualBox.

[Update]

VirtualBox does not circumvent Apple’s binary protection. A VirtualBox developer confirmed, that Apple hardware is required in order to run Mac OS as guest in VirtualBox. So without tempering either with VirtualBox’ EFI or with Mac OS X it is not possible to run OS X in VirtualBox on a PC.

On the other hand a closer look at the EFI booter integrated in VirtualBox could reveal either how to modify PC Bios‘ to boot Mac OS X DVDs natively or how to expand our beloved Chameleon.

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[Pre] Palm Pre’s Slider Oreo Issues

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Forum reports seem to be growing about this issue. A certain amount of first generation Palm Pre’s being sold all over the world seem to have slider issues. “It just wobbles too much, thus making it feel like a 500€ plastic toy.”, said a customer in a local O2 store.

Our testing device received from  a local O2 store in November, 2009 here in Berlin suffers the same slider issue.

When talking to O2’s customer support,  he by the way confirmed: “my Pre had the same issue. It is being repaired currently.”

Fortunately the repairing procedure with O2 is quite painless. If a customer realizes a defect within the first seven days of purchase, the local O2 store offers direct exchange of the device (this not only applies to Palm’s devices but to any cell phone O2 offers here in Germany). If defects are reported after seven days, they will be repaired within two weeks. Business customers are offered exchange devices at any time within 48hours.

If Palm Pre’s having the orea offect can be repaired at all, is still not really proven. According to a report on PreThinking, U.S. american devices are getting exchanged. Repair centers are not allowed to repair them.

When asking O2’s customer service, if the slider issue has been reported often, he answered: “No, this is a very rare issue, and we also asked Palm about this, and they also said, there is no slider issue.”

This might be the case for Germany, but in the meantime Palm in the U.S.A. seem to have implicitly confirmed the slider issues. In a PreCentral.net review article of the second generation Palm Pre (called Palm Pre Plus for the Verizon network), Dieter Bohn mentioned that “Palm says that they’ve fixed up the slider action (..)”.

In the meantime we’ve received our exchange device, and guess what? Although it still is a first generation Palm Pre, this slider has no orea effect.

It feels a lot more stable, making it eventually a serious tool for all the people who don’t want to follow the iPhone hype.

Picture is courtesy of PreThinking.com…

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[MacOS] Comprehensive Gigabyte Hardware Specification List

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With the advent of Snow Leopard many users have issues installing it onto PC based hardware. Well this is not very curious, since a PC is no Mac. Anyway as Gigabyte motherboards proved to be very close to the original Apple Intel specifications many people decided to buy those boards.

With the release of Snow Leopard DSDT patching seems to have become a must. Installation attempts will most likely fail without it. The intention of this list is to provide comprehensive information on the most used Gigabyte motherboards.

The original idea for this list was by a guy called ximekon (find original list here on InsanelyMac forums).

Model North- bridge South- bridge LAN Fire- Wire Audio BIOS Link Last Check
P35
P35-DS3L P35 ICH9 Gigabit -,- ALC888 F9 08/29/2009
P35-DS3 P35 ICH9 Gigabit -,- ALC889a F14 08/28/2009
P35-DS3R P35 ICH9 Gigabit -,- ALC889a F13 08/28/2009
EP35
EP35-DS3 P35 ICH9 RTL8111B -,- ALC889a F4 08/28/2009
EP35-DS3R P35 ICH9R RTL8111B -,- ALC889a F4 08/28/2009
EP35-DS3P P35 ICH9R Gigabit Yes ALC889a F6 08/28/2009
EP35-DS3L P35 ICH9 Gigabit -,- ALC888 F6 08/28/2009
EP35-DS4 P35 ICH9R RTL8111B -,- ALC889a F6 08/28/2009
EP45
EP45-DS3 P45 ICH10 2 x RTL8111C -,- ALC889a F9 08/28/2009
EP45-DS3R P45 ICH10R 2 x RTL8111C yes ALC889a F11c 08/28/2009
EP45-DS3P P45 ICH10R 2 x RTL8111C yes ALC889a F8 08/28/2009
EP45-DS3L P45 ICH10 RTL8111C -,- ALC888 F10 08/28/2009
EP45-DS3LR P45 ICH10R RTL8111C -,- ALC888 F2 08/28/2009
EP45-UD3 P45 ICH10 RTL8111C yes ALC889a F8 08/28/2009
EP45-UD3P P45 ICH10R RTL8111C yes ALC889a F9 08/28/2009
EP45-UD3L P45 ICH10 RTL8111C -,- ALC888 F5c 08/28/2009
EP45-UD3LR P45 ICH10R RTL8111C -,- ALC888 F5 08/28/2009
EP45-UD3R P45 ICH10R RTL8111C yes ALC889a F9 08/28/2009

you cant see this line, do you?

The Golden Gigabyte Model Rules

  • if last character of the model name is a “number” or a “P” (i.e. EP35-DS3 or EP45-DS3P etc.) it means ALC889a audio chipset
  • if last or penultimate character of the model name is an “L” (i.e. EP35-DS3L or EP45-DS3LR) it means ALC888 audio chipset
  • if last character of the model name is an “R” (i.e. P35-DS3R or EP45-UD3LR) it means SATA Raid controllers
  • The P35 or P45 strings in the beginning are fairly self explaining I suppose (P35 always with ICH9 and P45 always with ICH10)

Your Help is Wanted

Weather these rules nor the list above might be 100% accurate. It is only what I found on the net and summarized from the list above.

  • If you derived a DSDT.aml clean from a BIOS (like using Koalala’s DSDT patcher) and you fixed it for OSX86, you may post it in the comment’s section – don’t forget to tell how much RAM you had while compiling the DSDT.aml (Don’t add individual graphic or wi-fi strings. Just add onboard-devices like onboard-audio and onboard-ethernet.)
  • If your board is not on the list check Gigabyte’s pages and post the specifications in the comments section below.
  • If your board is listed but details above are wrong: please post it in the comments section below.
  • If you know the LAN chipset of the board and it is not listed precisely above (saying Gigabit) please post it in the comments section.

Please always crosscheck with the official Gigabyte specification page for your model (links to your model are included in the BIOS column) before adding a dsdt.aml or anything that could burn your BIOS.

[iPhone] iPhone 3G Hardware unlocked in Vietnam

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CNet.com reports Tuan Anh Do, a 29 years old business man from Hanoi, now offers hardware unlocking services for the iPhone 3G. He is owner of a couple of cell phone repair stores and he now managed to find a rather painless way to unlock the iPhone 3G and offer that as a service to customers. Unlocking costs about 80US$.

Tuan Anh Do is well known to the iPhone scene as TAmobile (Link here). He was also the first to extract the bootloader from the first generation iPhones.

Unfortunately unlocking requires desoldering, binary modifying and resoldering of the baseband chip and is therefore by far not fool proof. Painless unlocking here means “painless” for experiences solder technicians. For the rest of us we either plan a Vietnam holiday or wait for a store to offer that service around the corner. Anyway, find the whole story and some more really amazing pictures on Dong Ngo’s article on CNet.com.

Picture is courtesy of CNet.com

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