Our fellow iPhone Dev Team yesterday finally released QuickPwn for MacOS X. Sadly the Dev Team in the first place only provided a .torrent link (get torrent here) for distribution. We will come up with further details soon. For now: there are no reports about bugs about this version for Mac ,yet. Use “Archive Utility” to unpack, otherwise permission may be screwed up. Thumbs up for the Dev Team.
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:
binaries are provided for Linux, Microsoft Windows and MacOS X – get them here
TrueCrypt is the leading open-source software to encrypt drive volumes. It supports Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Version 5.1 has been released just 3.5 months ago in march. Now the Truecrypt team has released version 6.0 with the following features:
Parallelized encryption/decryption on multi-core/multi-cpu systems – thus demanding less time for the en- and decryption operations
Windows Vista, XP, 2003, 2008: run encrypted operating systems from hidden volumes (!)
Windows Vista, 2008: encrypt whole drives (incl. extended/logical partitions)
MacOS X: Create hidden volumes
Anyway: Permanent decryption has been removed from TrueCrypt’s bootloader, in order to support hidden operating system volumes. Permanent decryption now has to be done using the boot disk.
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.
Update jan 01, 2009: EFI software solution called EPOS available for free…
Update june 26, 2008: read latest news about EFI-X here…
We yet reported the rumors about an EFI emulator being put into a USB boot device (read here). The project is called EFI-X.com and the guys behind announced to open their shop tomorrow. Anyway they updated their website already and released some more details about “their” products. Though there are no information about pricing yet.
Many endusers will welcome this product. Endusers won’t need to download illegal distributions of adjusted and custom hacked/packed install DVDs (like Kalyway or iAtkos). People who where following the Brazil-Mac’s way will also like it. It simply seems to make the installation of MacOS X on whitebox PCs hassle-free, because we all will be able to use original retail DVDs. People will tend to buy those DVDs rather than just downloading from dark torrent sites. This is a strong position to like this product. Apple might like it aswell since it may help their propable guerilla strategy to silently undercut the PC market.
Anyway in the meantime several things have been mentioned that might detain people from buying it. First being the question of the legal status of EFiX. There has been a strong dispute about if EFI-X is legal or if it might contain parts of code that have been released under Apple’s open source license (like Dave Elliot’s Darwin Bootloader or the EFI emulaton Chameleon), which would require to release the source code of EFi-X as open source aswell. Second being something we’re gonna tell when we got enuff information…
“WINE Is Not An Emulator” has been released in version 1.0. Since the first release of a 16bit version in 1993 it only took 15 years to eventually bring version 1.0 to the world. Since 1993 the development was an ongoing process with the help of a large community of volontarily testers.
In a Linux environment WINE basically hooks Microsoft’s Win32 APIs and translates them to Linux APIs – as good as possible, because Microsoft does not provide documentation for all of their APIs. Getting a program like Adobe’s Photoshop to work seemed not to be a hard issue. This is because Adobe uses an own API for many things like windows and their well known tool boxes. The main problem are programs like Microsoft’s Office. Microsoft makes heavy use of implementing undocumented APIs into their own products. Anyway this is a large milestone into a world that allows to choose which operating system fits your needs best, but without the disadvantage of having not all the standard software available.
While WINE is intended for Linux users, Crossover – a commercial version of WINE developed by Codeweavers -is available aswell for Linux as for MacOS X. Crossover allows user friendly GUI based installation of many Win32 programs and has been released at the same time in version 7.
Moreover we will see the impact of WINE 1.0 also in our beloved ReactOS project – which is a free and open source implementation of a Microsoft Windows 32 bit operating system that aims at complete binary compatibility.
Congratulations to the WINE team. Keep up your great work.
Today Parallels released the server version of their virtualization software. The MacOS X version supports MacOS X server as guest operating system. The Linux and Windows versions will be released within the next six weeks, but they will not virtualize MacOS X – as Apple demanded. The price is currently set to 860€.
Update 26.06.2008: Read latest news about EFI-X here…
Update 22.06.2008: Read latest news about EFI-X here…
The newest on the market is announced to be released on 23. June. It is called EFI-X and seems to be quite a revolution. Technically it is a small USB dongle that contains a bootloader. That bootloader allows booting of native MacOS X installer DVDs or yet installed MacOS X installations…
Are you yet shackling your heads? Well, we are. It is said it will support any PC hardware to run OS X. At that point we are skeptical, since even Apple themselves are not able to support any hardware… We expect this to allow seamless installation on close-to-original-mac hardware. Which means: Intel Core2Duo on MoBo’s with Intel chipset and typical ATI or NVidia graphic adapters. But anyway: the installation will become simple and easy. No more BrazilMac workarounds or illegal downloading thru torrents from darkest places on the net. More features – as far as known yet – to be found in the updates section below the video.
We are quite curious about more details but currently the project’s website doesn’t contain anything more than we just told you. Netkas provides a video that shows the bootscreen. Sadly it is of poor quality and light, but see here:
Update (14.08.08):
Rumors on forums are telling about the specifications of your PC required to allow EFiX to run MacOS X
Intel Core 2 Duo (not likely to support AMD)
Intel chipsets on MoBo’s req
ALC889A or ALC885 audio chipset on MoBo to work out of the box
USB stick needs to plugged all the time (well who cares?)
Update II (15.06.08):
Althought not finished, the website of EFI-X.com has been updated during the last few hours. It seems, the following product versions of EFi-X will be sold:
EFiX for desktop computers
EFiX for notebooks
EFiX PCI version
EFiX complete systems
That looks promising. More to come at latest on 23rd… Update III (16.06.08)
An FAQ has been published by the EFi-X Team. It clearly states, AMD CPUs are not supported, yet – as expected…
“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
You don’t have a bootcamp partition installed
means your harddrive is single partitioned
You got Tiger installed
You know the size of your harddrive (you can also find out in “Disk Utility”)
Now, let the game begin…
Insert Leopard installation DVD into your drive
Start “Disk Utility” to make a .dmg image of your installation DVD (see picture)
click the Mac OS X Install DVD (highlight it) and choose New Image
Choose Read as type of image and name it Mac OS X Install DVD(see picture)
Wait forever (15-20minutes)
Close Diskutility and
Open terminal and enter: sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 139G "HFS+" "LeoInst" 10G
(in this example the total harddrive size is 149GB = “139G + 10G”)
This command resizes the first partition to 139GB and generates a second partition formated in “HFS+” with size of 10GB. The name of the second partition will be LeoInst (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)
After having executed this command successfully you need to reboot
After reboot open “Disk Utility” again
You should now see two partitition on your harddrive (see picture)
Click on the second partition named “LeoInst”
Click “Restore”
As Source choose your Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg image (should be located on the desktop!)
As destination drag and drop the second partition called “LeoInst”
click “Restore”
Wait about forever to have the DVD copied to your drive (again 15-20mins)
Close Disk Utility
Go to “System Preferences” and choose “Startup Disk”
Choose your Mac OS X Install DVD (which is in fact now a partition) as start volume
reboot system and install Leopard
Additional 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!
