We’ve been informed that a jailbreak for iPhone OS 3 beta is on doubtful trade for about 10$ (and on doubtful websites full of ads). We strongly recommend
to wait with updating to 3.0 until the iPhone Dev Team has released a working solution, that also helps people maintaining the unlock possibility for the iPhone 3G (means to not update the baseband!) and
to not use jailbreaks for 3.0. As there are no technical information available, how it works and thus what might be screwed up by applying it.
Be patient.
Update April 2, 2009: Now the iPhone Dev Team also comments on those non Dev Team jailbreaks. Obviously some people use a self modified version of QuickPwn. The iPhone Dev Team will of course give no support to people using modified QuickPwn versions.The Dev Team explicitly warns from updating to a iPhone OS beta version floating on peer2peer networks and from applying non Dev Team jailbreaks to it.The problem is the iPhone OS 3.0 is beta and thus contains lots of bugs. That is why Apple releases these betas in such a short period.
iPhone 3G users will also lose the possibility to unlock, since baseband 02.30 cannot be unlocked at this moment. Yellowsn0w is compatible to baseband 02.28 only. Last but not least: all iPhone OS 3 betas will cease to work at a certain point of time.
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
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)
Imagine the following situation. You are very keen on this EFI-X device that’s now on sale. So you order a testing device. Some days later the device arrives from Taiwan. Your EFI-X compliant system already kept waiting with a blank SATA 250GB on a Gigabyte EP35-DS3.
After having plugged the EFI-X module to your system, you install MacOS on your PC. It’s really worth the bunch of money since EFI-X lets MacOS boot like a charm. Easy and nice to handle for everyone who is not more willing to hack device drivers into their Hackintoshs. But as a tinkerer who wants to see how it works in real life and so you decide to apply the newest update for your EFI-X module. Since you’re a Mac user you decide to use the MacOS tool provided by the EFI-X team.
All works well during update, until you do the reboot. All of a sudden the intro boot screen of EFI-X looks quite garbled (like the screen below). You wonder what might have happened and do a reboot. As it doesn’t help you plug your EFI-X to another computer hoping you may be able to flash it again using Windows XP. But after all the installation argy-bargy with EFI-X’ virtual device driver under Windows XP – the update tool tells you, you are running the current version.
To make a long story short. EFI-X has customer service and they will exchange their defective units. You may also have a look at the EFi-X Bug Hunt forums for further assistence (please don’t link our article from EFI-X Bug Hunt forums, they will remove it and may ban you – don’t say we didn’t warn ya ;-) Anyway if you need to have access to your data until the RMA unit arrives, we prepped the following article. We’re going to show you how to make your system bootable after the EFI-X device broke for whatever reason.
A short remark before we start: this article is partly based on a HowTo by a guy going by the nick Menoob. We shamelessly stole the method of installing retail Leopards on PCs and adapted it a tiny bit for this EFI-X specific case. Anyway: all the shouts fly out to him.
II. What you need
30 minutes of your precious life time – you may use this time to think about why you didn’t buy a real Mac
remove the defective EFI-X device and if you feel you don’t need it, send it to the CCC for further examination
let only the MacOS drive and the CD/DVD drive plugged, unplug all other drives from your motherboard
start your computer and hit DEL key to go into your BIOS
inside of your BIOS: set the MacOS harddrive as first boot device and enable AHCI mode for SATA drives – your drives will appear orange/yellow in MacOS, don’t worry about that
save the BIOS changes and reboot
IV. Booting your system
turn on your computer
insert the just burnt Boot-132 CD-R into CD/DVD drive
during BIOS startup hit the F12 key to manually choose your boot device (applies to Gigabyte boards only!!!)
Choose to boot your CD/DVD drive
Your screen will show that ISOLINUX 3.6x is prepping to boot the Multiboot loader
since this ISOLINUX bootloader is not too user-friendly ;-) you will find yourself with a screen similar to this.
Hit the F8 Key. You’re gonna see this:
Hit the ESC Key. and You’re gonna be welcomed with this screen.
Now enter 80 and hit return, if the name of your MacOS harddrive shows up, 80 was the right number, if it does not show up, give 81 a try and so on.
Once you’ve found your MacOS harddrive, the bootloader will require again some parameters. Simply enter -v -x as parameters and hit return (you may find more infos about these Darwin boot parameters here)
if you experience the “still waiting for root device” issue, just reset your system and play with the AHCI mode for SATA inside of your BIOS
Anyway: booting will take a long while – in our case about 5 minutes until the login screen appears
login into your system
V. Saving your data
Examine which data you require from your formerly known as almost native system
plug your external harddrive (if you plan to migrate data to Windows, better have the external drive FAT32 formatted)
Copy the files
VI. Final Words
Ooop duh. You got some more options here that we cannot cover at this time:
You may revive this system with the hackint0sh ingredients (dsmos.kext and kexts for audio and video cards) – this will be a longer journey
You may also get a real Mac. In this case Apple will suddenly love you…
We recommend to give also Microsoft’s Vista a try. We feel like Vista Aero Glass effects are currently superior to Leopard’s effects. In this case Microsoft will love you (and us for suggesting this)…
You could also go up the hill to the end and find Debian and ask yourself why it took so long to understand that unix is beautiful – in this case nobody will really love you but during installation you’ll find plenty of new friends in the Ubuntu community explaining you Debian…
:-)
Anyway we hope that article helped you a tiny bit. If so you may also consider our sponsors, they also help you (and us of course)…
An update that has been distributed yesterday is likely to be the cause for sudden blue screens on Windows Vista 64bit. The yesterday update forces the user to restart, but after restarting, Windows Vista64 customers report that their system would not boot anymore. Instead a blue screen of death was shown.
Although the problem should be fixed now, many users still cannot boot. What you can do, if your system still hangs:
boot into Safe Mode (hit F8 when Window begins to boot after the BIOS messages)
click Start -> all Programs -> Kaspersky Internet Security
right click on Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 to Run As Administrator
Click Update and choose to Rollback to previous Databases
Wait some secs to some minutes for the rollback to perform
you may change the Update mode (from automatically to manually). But we’ve heard everything is under control again. So this step is not necessary.
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.
We’re back. All articles should still be available. Nothing more to tell.
As we expected the 2.0.1 firmware was still buggy like 2.0 and since yesterday night, Apple offers firmware 2.0.2 for iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G. They claim this firmware version solves UMTS/3G issues for iPhone 3G users. Besides that information Apple don’t tell anything.
As we investigated a little: customers who already installed this new firmware still encounter 3G connection problems (see Apple’s forum here).
As we’re not aware if there are any advantages for 2.0 and 2.0.1 users: we recommend not to update now. We will get back to you with more details, once we tested 2.0.2 carefully.
It is commonly known that Apple’s products don’t belong to the safest products in the computer industry. For quite some time now: Botnet builders are using the well known zombie technique to gain control over AppleTV to use it in botnets. This is due to AppleTV’s large market share (of about 0,5%)… Yes…
This is how these Botnet builders do it:
they walk into stores and buy newly released blurays like “I am Legend”
they illegally decrypt it
convert it to x264 for better compatibility as eMail-attachments (we all know: many providers only allow 10GB per attachment)
then they modify the x264 headers to include buffer overflows adjusted to work on AppleTV only.
For several years now bad guys were sending prepared x264 movies as email-attachments. But now the time is up. Apple released a security update for AppleTV, that prevents buffer overflows. All our AppleTVs will from now on be safe from bad botnetters…
The truth behind it
Ok, you got us here. Besides from kidding: there is no need for this update. The only reason in our opinion is: they wanna stop people using AppleTV for more than the allowed things. There are no buffer overflows that we are aware that are being used by botnetters currently. Since AppleTV’s market share is so low, this wouldn’t even make any sense from an economical point of view for the botnetters.
“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!
