The open source encryption program TrueCrypt 6.1 has been released. It now features:
After Psystar countersued Apple a month ago for anticompetitetive business practices (read here). Apple’s attorneys now respond on 23 pages. Apple’s argumentation in short: Psystar violates Apple’s license agreement when putting Mac OS X on Psystar’s OEM computers.
In the paper Apple tries to circumvent the whole monopoly issue by argueing that there is no specific Mac OS X market, but an Apple Computer market. And since there is no specific market for the sole operating system, Apple is no monopolist. Rather than having a Mac OS X operating system market, there is a market for computers and in this market Apple Computers compete with other computers. Apple sums up that Psystars charges need to be rejected, because Apple as a company cannot be forced to help their competitors and thus weakening their own market position.
You may read the whole argumentation here at ZDNET. They released the whole 23 pages as a PDF.
Our comment:
This whole topic remains fascinating. From a technical point of view we would not follow Apple’s argumentation here, because of a simple fact. Mac OS X is heavily based on lots of open source parts from the Linux and GNU worlds. And the Mac OS X’s kernel Darwin was and still is available for x86 based PCs aswell. This might mean by releasing the kernel as a stand alone version, they implicitly admit that the operating system is only artificially bound to the hardware. You may find more some technical notes in our recent article here (see VII. Modify startup script) and on the wiki of the Chaos Communication Congress 2007.
Finally Apple released update 10.5.5 yesterday. Features of 10.5.5 include Apple’s recent security updates, Addressbook bugfixes and lots of other fixes (read all details here). To sum things up: Apple recommends to apply this update as soon as possible. And yes we will obey.
All genuine Mac users can safely update. There are no reports about problems. You may do so using the Software Update App.
OSX86 user may wait some days, we are just examining the steps. Most likely best thing is to download the Combo Update from here and use our instructions here. People report broken audio drivers on ALC883 chipsets (AppleHDA patcher solved this). We’ll get back to you once we checked out all the details.
Open Tech inc. – a previously unknown company is in the starting blocks to provide Intel based computers that are able to run MacOS X. We hackintoshed seniors may be irritated by such an announcement since almost any Intel based computer is able to run MacOS X, nowadays.
In contrast to Psystar, who is currently being sued by Apple for copyright violation, Open Tech inc. will not pre-install MacOS X on their computers. As there is currently no more information available, stay tuned for more news…
As member of the iPhone Dev Team, planetbeing today released “XPwn”. He describes “XPwn” as an experimental pwnage tool for Linux. Although XPwn was proposedly developed for Linux users, it actually is a cross-platform tool for command line users. Update: It does not support firmware 2.0 yet.
Warning
The XPwn tool is not intended to be used by newbies. That’s why it’s called experimental pwnage tool. It provides a command line interface only, what means you can dreadfully screw up your iPhones using it. The first version of XPwn seemed to have issues when writing the NOR firmware. Although planetbeing has obviously fixed this problem, we really recommend to wait for Pwnage 2.0.
XPwn’s versions
Experimental Pwnage comes in different flavours:
XPwn’s features
Experimental Pwnage implements many of Apple’s proprietary container formats: img2, 8900, complzss, iBootIm, dmg, HFS+/HFSX.
Nice work. Congrats to planetbeing. See XPwn hackint0sh thread here.
Abstract
Just four weeks ago Apple released update 10.5.3. It seems it didn’t hold too long, since 10.5.4 has been released two days ago. Features of 10.5.4 include Apple’s recent security updates, RAW image support for many cameras, Airport bugfixes, iCal bugfixes, Safari bugfixes, Spaces and Exposé bugfixes (read all details here). To sum things up: Apple recommends to apply this update as soon as possible.
So the most unanswered question for us white-box OS X users: how to update my Hackintosh? There are two different ways, depending which revision you’re running currently. If you are on 10.5.3 update is fairly easy. If you are on a revision below 10.5.3 you need to apply some more steps when using the combo update. Follow our short instructions and your are finished virtually before you even started ;-)
Update from 10.5.3
You can simply use the auto-updater from within MacOS X’ Software Update (see picture).
Update from 10.5.2, 10.5.1 or even earlier
Get yourself the comboupdate from here: Download,
then apply the instructions we already described here. Because the instructions for updating to 10.5.2, 10.5.3 or using the 10.5.4 combo update are the same.
Enjoy and tell us about your experiences.
“and first for something complete different”: Muzaq… coding or administrating system can’t do without gooood muzaq. Check our latest tunes here :-)
This time we’re gonna install Leopard from a .dmg image instead from DVD. The purpose is having a repair and recovery system by the hand in case you need it. My story is this: after having had a clean install of Leopard finished and having had applied all the updates, my MBP simply crashed again and again (two mouse pointers error – I found a solution in the meantime: that bug belongs to the Leopard Graphics Update – read it here howto fix it), since at that point I could not fix it, I then decided to reinstall. Something seemed fishy and would hopefully be gone after another fresh install. But as you expect: the same problem occurred again. I then decided to restore my previous tiger install and installed the Leopard DVD to a second partition. This way nothing can stop me, whereever I am, whatever does not work…
Ok what to do now?
I assume
Now, let the game begin…
Mac OS X Install DVD (highlight it) and choose New Image
Read as type of image and name it Mac OS X Install DVD(see picture)
sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 139G "HFS+" "LeoInst" 10GLeoInst (disk0s1 is in this case the EFI partition – see here, what makes the EFI partition so interesting, system partition starts at disk0s2 – that’s the partition we’re gonna resize and split into disk0s2 and disk0s3)reboot
Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg image (should be located on the desktop!)
Mac OS X Install DVD (which is in fact now a partition) as start volumeAdditional notes
These instructions are intended to be applied to genuine Apple systems rather than HackMacs. In my case I used my MacBook Pro. Because of the different .kexts to be applied to HackMacs this guide will not work for those systems! Be warned!