Tag Archives: leopard

[MacOS] Is EFI-X illegally using 3rd Party Program Code?

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About a year ago a company called ASEM released a device called EFI-X. This device has been claimed to be capable of booting several Microsoft Windows versions and Mac OS X Leopard.

Legal concerns

From the beginning there were question regarding the legal status of the device. But ASEM claimed the device is legal, although it circumvents Apple’s binary protection using Apple’s copyrighted secret operating system keys (OSK1 and OSK2).

Technical issues

Anyway EFI-X devices had some issues. Many forums reported about problems with Bonjour and sharing in general. In the meantime articles from the official EFI-X support forums have been suddenly disappeared. Customers reporting issues or solutions and workaround to severe bugs have been banned from EFI-X support forums – our own help article to recover almost lost data was removed aswell and one of our members has been officially banned from their forums (the reason was this article in october 2008).

Examining EFI-X in deep

Now some frustrated customers who are on the other hand technologically very familiar have examined the EFI-X device in deep. One of the main points AsereBln found: in contrast to what EFI-X is stating: “Our approach is entirely different, (..) all our code and development is our own only” – they seem to be using program code that has been developed by the OSX86 community though. They seem to be using “Disabler.kext“. Moreover another user (RezRov) found out the EFI-X Windows update software seems to be violating the LGPL as it incorporates a modified USB device library (libusb-win32).

Use of possibly unlicensed 3rd party program code, possibly illegal use of Apple security keys, and customer support below grade for a 170€ (250US$) commercial product that seems to be the summary about a year after product launch.

Lessons learnt

We suppose end users should be aware of this possible hassle. Only an original Apple Mac is really hassle free and 100% compatible to a Mac. But if you are technologically interested and have the time and motivation search the OSX86 communities for setups. The OSX86 forums are full of knowledge and willing to help. But remember a PC won’t ever be 100% compatible to a real Mac.

[MacOS] Recommended Apps: QuickSilver

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I. Abstract

You don’t like Spotlight, because it is too slow? But you want to to speed up command execution? Yes there is a nice freeware solution available called QuickSilver by BlackTree. Wikipedia writes: Quicksilver “allows users to use the keyboard to rapidly perform tasks such as launching applications, manipulating files and data, running scripts, or sending e-mail.”

II. Links

You’d better get used to using QuickSilver. We strongly recommend to not use Mac OS without it:

» Download QuickSilver…
» BlackTree Website…

III. Screenshots

QuickSilver 1.png

QuickSilver 2.png

QuickSilver 3.png

[News] Steve Jobs back in Business

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We’re almost sure, you read it already all over the net: Steve Jobs is back in his office. Rumors say he was transplanted a liver about two months ago and he is in good health condition.

Our comment

Does all these news affect anything? Currently it seems no.

Apple’s presentations can also be run by Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Bertrand Serlet, and Scott Forstall as we’ve seen on the last WWDC. But what about the future? What about the products?

This year’s WWDC

This year’s WWDC did not have new big products. It was all about the operating system update to 10.6. (called Snow Leopard) and iPhone 3GS that mainly has been speed improved and now got features that many people said to be overdue.

The future?

What will be the next WWDC presentation about? Yet another Mac Book Super Pro? Or another iPhone 3Gs2?

Who will be the wholistic spin doctor who feeds the company with ideas and innovations? This is the main question. And we’re gonna find out within the next few years.

Competition

We suppose competition will become harder at least in the field of cell phones. As Palm hired Apple’s iPod architect Jon Rubinstein three years ago it seems Apple has lost someone knowing how to design user interfaces for digital media.

What leads us to the bold question: why not buying Palm to stop those “separatistic” tendencies and make Jon Rubinstein Steve Job’s successor?

[MacOS] Recommended Apps: SimplyRar and MacPar Deluxe

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I. Abstract

Coming from the Windows world most of us people know the .rar archive format very well. Besides the newer 7zip format, Rar allows a good compression and is widely used on internet distribution.

II. What do we need?

People who only need to have a decompressor for compatibility reasons can use MacPar Deluxe. Users who also want to be able to compress files aswell need to get SimplyRar:

» For Uncompressing only use MacPar Deluxe (download here)…
» For Compressing and Uncompressing use SimplyRar (download here)…

III. How do these tools work?

III.I.MacPar Deluxe

MacPar Deluxe is intended for unpacking only. The part of the name Par indicates its main use, as it is a tool for people downloading things from the usenet. Par files are files that contain repair information for damaged main files. Anyway: MacPar Deluxe also contains a very simply unrar engine.

MacRar - MacPar Deluxe.png

III.II. SimplyRar

SimplyRar is a graphical user interface for the free command line version of rar for Mac OS. It contains (almost) all features of the command line. As a switcher I currently cannot tell what features are missing in comparison to WinRar for Windows.

MacRar - SimplyRar.png

[MacOS] Yet another Still Waiting for Root Device

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Long time no see to this old friend called “Still waiting for root device”. But with 10.5.7 the time had come again. As some of the tipps we compiled below helped us there is no warranty that it will help you. As the reasons for this funky brother are too indifferent.

Used Hardware

  • Gigabyte GA EP35 DS3
  • Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 7600 GT 256MB (Device ID 0x0391)
  • HP w2207 TFT (w/ integrated USB hub)
  • Buffalo AirStation WLI2-PCI-G54S (recognized as Third Party Wireless Card)

What you may try

  • Unplug external USB drives and devices
  • Unplug other internal drives
  • Instead of Rebooting: Shutdown and wait a couple of secs before manually turning your HackMac on again
  • Enable AHCI in BIOS for your drives (in case you see drive icons in orange, apply kexts included with the binaries’ release of Chameleon 2)
  • Try to boot into Safe Mode with -x (see more Darwin flags here) and
    Repair Permissions from within the Disk Utility.app
  • Remove the Extensions.mkext and rebuild it (cf. OSX86Project)
    myMek: rm /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
    myMek: kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions/
    myMek: kextcache -L -N -e

About our test environment

This is based on the approach to install from the original unmodified retail DVD. Buy it, please. And also go and buy a MacBook (Pro) aswell, you will need it anyway as your HackMac will need special treatments once in a while. A HackMac can never be intended for productive environment. Don’t forget this. No matter what a clone manufacturer or a USB dongle merchant says.

Anyway as we are quite conservative with running systems we don’t feel we need to change to often ways. That’s why we’re still using our own EPOS I. (download here) approach, which is based on Munky’s (more info here) findings.

Good Luck! And don’t forget to buy a Mac :-)

[MacOS] PearC Clone Supplier admonishs German Blogger

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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?

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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…

itunes_bluray.png

[Virus] First Mac Zombies in iBotnet

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In their latest “Virus Bulletin” Symantec employees report that obviously the first Mac OS based botnet has appeared. They call it the iBotnet. Two trojan malwares could be identified as:

  • OSX.Iservice
  • OSX.Iservice.B

Technique

The trojans aim at gaining the user password or the root password – depending on what configuration you’re running. By default the “root” account is disabled on OS X and therefore user rights are getting leveled in certain situations. When having gained the user or root password the system is compromised and gets added to the botnet.

Distribution

Both these files are getting distributed currently via peer2peer networks like bittorrent. The trojans are included in illegal copies of

  • iWork09 and
  • Adobe Photoshop CS 4

Dissemination

It is estimated that some thousand Macs are already infected.

Behaviour

There is strong revealing that the botnet already has been used for Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks using a PHP script.

Conclusion

From analyzing the trojans the Symantec guys reason that there might also be other versions already in the wild, since it seems to be a kinda flexible and expandable technique. Our recommendation: get yourself a virus scanner for your Mac, asap.

[MacOS] Snow Leopard Beta Build 10A314 Seeded

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Since yesterday Apple seeds a beta build 10A314 of the forthcoming Snow Leopard. Developers report Apple recommends them to test 64-bit kernel extensions (Kexts) to speed up transition from 32-bit to 64-bit.

It does not seem that this build contains the rumored new User Interface (UI) called “marble” , that AppleInsider.com has reported a couple of days ago.

[MacOS] EPOS I. – EFI Post Install for White-Box PCs

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We were working quite some time on this. Now here is EPOS I. – the “EFI Post Install” Script for white-box PCs that are almost hardware compatible with Apple’s devices

“EPOS I.” is an “EFI Post Install” Script

What does it do?

EPOS helps installing retail DVD’s of Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on white-box PC’s. EPOS is SlimBuild-Preboot compliant. And as such it makes installation very easy. Grab a copy of a SlimBuilt-Preboot CD image that matches your hardware (motherboard and graphics), then install Leopard and after installation run EPOS.

Technically EPOS I. automates the necessary steps of preparing MacOS’ native EFI partition and the installation of (legacy-) kexts to this EFI partition. The whole shebang was first discovered and described by Munky (all shouts fly out to him!). You may find his article here on the InsanelyMac forums.

Installation and Usage:

  • unplug ethernet cable from your white-box PC
  • copy EPOS I.zip to USB drive for instance
  • install Leopard from retail DVD using a SlimBuild-Preboot standard compatible CD (find links to tested disks below
  • boot installed Leopard using the SlimBuild-Preboot CD again
  • on first boot provide all the registration information required from Apple
  • see desktop for the first time
  • unpack EPOS I. and run it as ROOT from a terminal (have your SlimBuild-Preboot CD mounted)
  • EPOS takes about a minute to install everything
  • remove SlimBuild-Preboot CD from drive, reboot and let Apple’s autoinstaller grab the newest updates
  • enjoy a white-box Mek

Habit:

  • EPOS must be executed from the disk that will hold the EFI bootloaders.
  • If you are unsure what this means: better make sure you only have your DVD drive and your OS X harddrive connected.
  • I recommend using this script on a clean and fresh installed system, no other operating systems on the same disk!
  • prefers mounted SlimBuild-Preboot CD’s for getting kexts and the com.apple.Boot.plist
    (looks for /Volumes/SlimBuild-Preboot/initrd.img and /Volumes/SlimBuild-Preboot/com.apple.Boot.plist)
    if no SlimBuild-Preboot CD is found, EPOS tries to find Extensions in EPOS’ own Extensions folder

Supports:

  • autoextraction kexts from SlimBuild-Preboot CD
  • kexts in own Extensions folder
  • autoextraction com.apple.Boot.plist from SlimBuild-Preboot CD
  • com.apple.Boot.plist in own Plist folder
  • internally pretested with Leopard retail DVD’s 10.5.0, 10.5.1, 10.5.4 and 10.5.5

Notes:

  • Munky’s EFI Boot 6.1 included (found here)
  • compatible to Galaxy’s SlimBuild-Preboot creator 2.0 (Kudos!) found here
  • Tested with ximekon’s (Kudos, aswell) Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 SlimBuild-Preboot CDs found here

Error handling:

  • integrated for a bunch of common errors, anyway it remains an ugly script

Todo:

  • code cleanup / rewrite ;-)
  • autoinstallation of custom kernels
  • GUI is in the works, but don’t ask for timelines, we all got jobs to feed our families

License & restrictions:

  • This script is freeware but may NOT be used for commercial purposes!
  • It may NOT be included in SlimBuild-Preboot Disks that contain original / modded Apple kexts.
  • that means until not everything is self enabled via homebrew or legacy kexts you may only include it in your private SlimBuilds but don’t distribute them, please.
EPOS 0.95 running on a sample system :


Feedback

You are welcome to leave a note here in the comment’s section or on the insanelymac forums.

Download EPOS

Please download from the version history overview below. Did you know our sponsors yet? No we neither. Because it’s just Google adds. Anyway these premium sponsors really got the coolest offers and moreover by considering them you help us in return maintaining this site free… :-)

Version history:

  • 0.5 semi automatic really much too ugly one day rapid prototype (not released)
  • 0.6 rewrote using functions (not released)
  • 0.7 autodetermining of EFI partition (not released)
  • 0.8 improved error handling for common errors we experienced (not released)
  • 0.9 included autoextraction for SlimBuild-Preboot images (not released)
  • 0.95 included com.apple.Boot.plist extraction (released) –
    » Download EPOS 0.95 here…
  • 0.95.1 (cosmetic) bugfixes (not released)
  • 0.97 com.apple.Boot.plist bugfix (released) –
    » Download EPOS 0.97 here…
  • 10.0 “the got rich as bill from writing even uglier code” version (will definitly be released) ;-)