Tag Archives: OSx86

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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] Psystar Release Rebel EFI

1 Reply

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

Image 1 of 2