My MacBook Wind

How do we define what makes the perfect hackintosh netbook? Let us count the ways...

Or rather, the one singular point that hackintoshers look for: compatibility.

Of course, having settled for something less than a real Mac hardly entails anyone to expecting out of the box compatibility. Which means one has got to prepare for some substantial tweaking to get stuff working, like installing kexts or dabbing in the terminal and getting some apple scripting action going on.

Compatibility in this sense takes on another definition: stock hardware needs some special techie know-how for them to function under OS X but the main point is that in the end, they do work. Meaning, one doesn't have to invest in more mac-compatible hardware to swap with the default in-compatible ones.

The MSI Wind, in this light, remains the "darling of the hackintosh community" when it came to netbooks.

Some have taken netbook hackintosh compatibility to a higher level in that they started to look for the nearest equivalent to the real Mac experience. Take for example the case of the default WiFi modules in the various MSI Wind models. The Realtek module isn't recognized as Airport but works by using the WLAN utility instead, which is hardly anywhere the real Mac experience so some people have actually opted to spend the extra $25 to swap their stock module with one of those Airport compatible ones, like the Dell .

But how far does one go in terms of money to get as close to the real Mac experience? I for one am content with my setup. The only thing I sometimes regret is not getting the model with built-in bluetooth. But even that still isn't reason enough for me to order some internal bluetooth module off of e-bay. It's rather a question of how far I'm willing to endure the tweaking rituals required to keep rolling and how long I'm willing to sit waiting for the VooDoo/AppleHDA team over at the msiwind.net forums to get mic input and headphone audio out on my MacBook Wind.

Yeah, so I should just buy a real Mac if I'm gonna be this obsessed with every bit of detail. But I can't afford it. And so my inner child, one that can be bratty at times, will prevail.

I knew I was bound to encounter some problems with my hackintosh along the way. One of them is DVD Player's stubborn refusal to grace my MacBook Wind with its service, sticking its tongue at me like so:

I can't help but smile as I pause a split second, before hitting on that blue  OK button that, in my opinion and much to Steve Jobs' pleasure - not that he'd be pleased I'd harnessed one of his beloved big cats in a measly netbook, is "lickable" indeed.

What's funny is that I took the error message as an allusion to what I'm really doing. Instead of blurting out quite blatantly as "You nasty pirate! The nerve you have for running oh so chic OS X Leopard on your scum of netbook dirtbag!", not quite unlike Micros0ft's "You may be a victim of software piracy" with its Windows Genuine Advantage scheme, I get a simple "a valid DVD drive could not be found" and DVD Player would just gracefully shut itself down as soon as I click on the OK button.

Snobbish but calm and composed. Reminiscent of some scene from a movie I'd watched, wherein a plain looking gal comes sheepishly  in view, a bundle of naught but nerve-endings raw obviously, to confess her undying love for this dashing debonair of a guy. And then this guy just merely looks at her and says without flinching "I'm way out of your league".

Oh the indifference so cold could reduce an innocent heart into destitute ashes and dust!

Good thing I've VLC to save me from all that drama :D

Perhaps I took cue from the latest look my MacBook Wind desktop now sports so I adopted this new theme :D and I also obliterated that "Just another Wordpress blog". 

Nope. I did not have to do yet another fresh install of Leopard on the MSI Wind plus kexts etc. etc. etc. But, I must admit, I was on the verge of doing it.

On one previous post, I related how I nitpicked through the installation ritual - OS X Leopard itself on 10.5.4 + 10.5.5 + 10.5.6 + kexts and all those cherries on top. Sure enough, though I've little to no substantial proof that the ritual was really efficient, I was able to reduce the boot time to figures I'm now happy with. 

But there was one glitch that I encountered so far; Realtek WLAN Utility became quirky. It had always been a nuissance, popping up incessantly every time I log in, whining for attention like a spoiled little brat of a kid. I'd learned to tame it then by creating a script via Apple Script Editor:

tell application "System Events"
   set visible of process "NAME_OF_REALTEK_UTILITY_INSIDE_THESE_QUOTES" to false
end tell

read it here

Gave it a dummy proof name "Minimize Realtek Utility", saved it as an app in my Application folder. Then I added it to my account's login items. It did great in disciplining that Realtek utility, eliminating the need to stop a while and close the program's window manually.

Back to that glitch I was talking about originally. Well, it seems I couldn't get the internal WiFi module to work--as in it's not recognized by the system:



And before you rais your brows and curse me to my grave, yes, WiFi is on. I hit fn+F11 to switch the module on or off--please do give me the credit for knowing at least that much. So, as indicated by this so called "Notice", I obediently went to Sys Pref once again and to Network panel. And here's what I get:



And fresh from burying my nose, and to some extent - my entire face and some locks of hair, in Mac-centric magazines, I thought of uninstalling the Realtek WLAN Utility by running the uninstall script that came with it in the package I downloaded from some link off of the msiwind.net forums, and then remembering to do some maintenance cache clearing via Onyx as I went along the way.

But reboot after reboot prompt, that error message never failed to show up each and every time I logged in. I wasn't able to test if I was even able to connect to a WiFi signal despite of this error message; it wasn't possible, there was nothing I could do until I "enabled the WiFi card" like the notice said as the buttons in the utility window were disabled.

Despaired and on the brink of tears - ok that was a little exaggerated, I gave one last shot at launching OSX86 Tools  just to see if tweaking stuff a bit could help. That was when I got curious with one option sitting unsuspectedly down at the bottom part of the tool window:

  

Given that I was left with no other solution but to do another fresh install, and that all my data have always lived in my iPod (there's a community of odds and ends of stuff in there, growing faster than I ever imagined like spore), I went on and did a restore, not really knowing what to expect from that action.

My MacBook Wind rebooted and voilà! What a pleasant surprise, I must say! I was greeted with that awesome, super cool Welcome Intro movie - the one with the flying "Welcome" in different languages. It felt like I just did an actual reinstall since I was prompted to configure my user account, enter some personal info etc. And, I didn't expect this one, I could actually see myself staring goofily in the box where my user avatar should be: my webcam was already working!  Great! So I striked a pose and set the size like any normal self-respecting camwhore would.

And then when I logged in to my new account, my documents previously copied from my iPod weren't there anymore as expected. My wallpaper was back to the original Leopard Aurora image, and my dock was humongous again. But Realtek, as usual, popped up but that error message was gone! Hurray!

The utility wasn't automatically minimized like it used to and so I checked if the little app-script I created still existed. As I opened Finder to take a peep at my Application folder, there was my app-script as well the dozen or so apps I'd installed prior to doing a restore via OSX86 Tools.

Hmmm...so that's why my webcam was accessible during setup. And yes, my dock contained the iLife apps as well. So the restore option doesn't touch the Applications folder and only dumps files in the User folder. 

I think this might be great for when you want to transform a friend's MSI Wind into a MacBook Wind and let him/her experience the delight of opening a "brand new" Mac, all ready when he/she is :D Nice!

And since I'm now happy again with things, I even went ahead and changed the Realtek utility's icon as a reward for its behaving well again:

Loved this weekend and as with any normal weekends, I spent it tinkering with my MacBook Wind.

As in the last post, I did a fresh installation of Leopard which left the system in the "bare" mode, no make-up whatsoever. And so it was high time for some customization, I decided.

On with the background picture. I chose my all time fave, a landscape pic featuring the Trianon (I already forgetten which, Grand or Petit) of Marie Antoinette which I shot myself during my oh too short stint in France.

And then it struck me that me that my screen was somehow different than the way I've always remembered it.

adobe - darker

Before I knew it, I was back in System Preference --> Display and boom!

regular - washed

I switched to Adobe RGB 1998 and the "washed" appearance was no more to be replaced with a more vivid rendering. My screen was a bit "darker" in a sense but the pics are crisper and much more alive than before. I'm not so sure the screenshots do justice to the change I'm blabbing about but the main point is that it's definitely different

Now I don't know if I even should be using this display setting in terms of hardware support --I'm running a mere netbook here which isn't exactly the epitome of "premium" components -- and there's always this worry of finding my measly 10" display bricked along the way. So, I tried reverting to the normal setting and as soon I saw my screen washed in unnecessary whiteness, I went back to the Adobe RGB 1998 setting.

Perhaps I'm willing to risk it and find peace for my eyes.

Apparently it does seem cool to have Mac OS X Leopard running on a PC, a netbook at that. Well, at least that's what my roomie thinks.

She bought herself a new Asus 1000H and requested that I transform it into a Mac. Short of explaining to her that I really am not transforming her netbook into a Mac, since installing OS X is different from transforming her hardware into an Apple one. It would require magic and my powers were limited to hacking techniques I didn't even invent in the first place. 

To cut the story short, this entire week was devoted to installing Leopard on her Asus 1000H. And boy was it difficult!

First, I only had the msiwindosx86 slipstream DVD installer which is customized specifically for the MSI Wind, not the Asus 1000H. But I still trudged on, crossing my fingers and hoping against all odds that it would work.

1 try:

I plugged in my external DVD drive to the Asus 1000, slapped in the msiwindosx86 DVD and rebooted. Darwin loaded but I got stuck at a cryptic line along the way, never getting to the graphical installation program.

2 try:

Again, I went scrounging the net for some clue and found out that you can't install OS X on the 1000H without flashing your BIOS with a compatible one that you get from here.

It worked. All but sound. And try as I might, there wasn't anything I could to make audieee work.

So, being true to my nature, I opted to do another fresh install as I thought this glitch might be caused by the fact that I didn't uncheck the patched kernel during install. According to the tutorials, it's important that the vanilla kernel be used if you want audieee to work.

3rd try:

Reinstallation success with the patched kernel left unchecked. But I got stuck at the welcome/configuration step, where I kept getting the Spinning Beach Ball of Death when I clicked on "Do Not Transfer blah blah" option.

I hit the net again, and found that I needed to interrupt Darwin during loading and at the "boot:" prompt, type:

-s

/sbin/fsck -fy

/sbin/mount -uw /

touch /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

(entering each line one by one)

and the change root's password so I could log in to the system later.

passwd root

After several tries, and I dunno why I had to try more than once since it's supposed to work at the first try, I was rocking :D

I installed audiee, which was just a matter of dragging the unzipped app to the Applications folder.

And hop-la! We got sound! :D

So I'm such a mac zealot and from over this last weekend, where I spend a lot of time using my MacBook Wind as my primary computer, I've developped muscle memory and found myself hitting Alt + C to copy files on my office PC.

Mainly that's due to the fact that I've gone ahead and fiddle with the physical keys on the Wind's keyboard. Yep, I'd swapped the Alt and the Windows logo key on both sides of the space bar.

Here's what it looks like:

It has been almost 2 months since I first installed OS X Leopard on my pearl white MSI Wind, thus producing my MacBook Wind. And I don’t know if that spiffy Leopard intro movie is to be held accountable but I installed and reinstalled about 3 times in the first 2 weeks ever since I had the DVD installer with me.

I experimented with the kexts and fixes combined with the updates (10.5.5 and 10.5.6) just to see which broke in which etc. For one, now I know that the Sonix webcam would work if you update QuickTime to 7.5 without having to go to 10.5.5. Updating to 10.5.5 from 10.5.4, which is default for the msiwindosx86 DVD install, does break your video bringing resolution down to a squashed 800 x 600, sound, and trackpad (mine’s Sentellic) but not your keyboard. Updating from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6 breaks all of the four.

After my 3rd fresh installation, I thought of just sticking with that setup for a while. No problem as it was December already and the holidays were coming, leaving me with little time to spare for tinkering. In fact, it was my New Year’s resolution to let a month pass without wiping out my hard drive again for yet another reinstall.

It wasn’t so hard to live with an aging installation after all. XP in my PC at the office is already a year and a half. It’s sluggish alright, but still working. So I thought that if OS X’s Unix origins lived up to its claim to glory, my hackinstosh MacBook Wind shouldn’t have any troubles going for a far better record than that.

I was trudging along fine, installing Parallels and running XP on virtual machine for when I wanted to use Word 2003 with Wordfast for those translation workloads I just had to finish at the apartment after office hours. Of course I had Office:Mac 2008 installed but my CAT Tool, Wordfast, isn’t compatible with it. I could access the net at coffee shops and even while I ate my fries at the Jollibee branch at the other end of our street.

But it came to a point that I noticed it took so long to boot up to OS X lately. It’s not blazing fast as the stock Xandros on the Eee PC but as far as I can remember, the boot up time should at least be as decent as XP’s. That was when I started timing boot times. My iPod timer recorded a molasses like average of 1 min. 20 sec.

I resorted to the forums and found out I wasn’t only the one with this problem. However, I also found at that about 80% of the MSI Wind hackintoshers experienced 30 seconds - less than a minute boot times. I am irked beyond compare.

So, with the little knowledge I gained from my installation experiments, I decided to wipe out my hard drive again. All my files were practically living somewhere in my iPod so backing up was totally an irrelevant step for me.

Here’s what I did:

1) Reinstalled from msiwindosx86 DVD - out of the box, everything worked great as it should. Except WiFi, Webcam. Issues with the mic and audio out to headphone jack are not included in the problem, I didn’t use these a lot and so it doesn’t bother me to wait for the VooDoo AppleHDA to be released. I didn’t install any apps yet.

2) Updated to 10.5.5 - I knew my trackpad would break so I plugged in a mouse. My keyboard was working fine and that’s about all I need to enter my admin password to install the 10.5.6 update.

3)Updated to 10.5.6 - My mouse was still working fine but my keyboard was bricked. It was time to install the kexts and such and as I didn’t have an external keyboard, I just activated the keyboard viewer from System Preferences. This allowed me to use the virtual keyboard which I could summon from the menu bar.

4) Installed the kexts - It was no problem finding kexts from the net but there are lots of versions out there, you end up confused so you download everything you find in the end and then install them all in the end just to be on the safe side.

This is when experimenting becomes useful. I used Paul’s Wind Driver Set but swapped out some parts like for the video, I used the non-artifact Intel GMA 950, downloaded from the forums at msiwind.net again.

At each step, I recorded the boot up times. When Darwin starts, I intervene with the countdown to 5 and then hit Enter with my right hand as my left triggers the timer in my iPod.

I started with 00:00:55.662. Next 00:00:50.617. Lastly 00:00:38.194.

Unbelievable! I was expecting to see boot up times that worsened at each update but the results clearly showed otherwise.

I’m not sure if it was the kexts affecting the boot times. The 303 kexts I backed up running on my system via OSx86 Tools is hardly a minimal figure. So it might have been the combination of updates and kext installation in between that’s a more probable candidate as a culprit.

I've installed all the apps I wanted and am still getting a not too shabby 00:00:40.757.

I’m just happy Leopard is now living up to its supposedly inherent feline speeds.   

I'm used to having to face an installation program when getting a new application on my PC. It's one of those familiar landmarks that let me know I'm home or near home, if you will.

In hopes of getting a messenger app other iChat on my MacBook Wind, I got Yahoo Messenger from the DVD I got from a fellow forumer. So, being the PC user I normally am, I clicked on the smiling Yahoo Messenger file in Finder, expecting to see an installation pop up and bug me.

Instead, I saw Yahoo Messenger immediately open. "Wow, this is really fast!" I thought. I quit the program after using it for a while

And then the problem was that YM was no where to be found when, later, I wanted to use it again. Where did it go?

I checked my applications folder but didn't see it; only iChat as if beckoning me with an inaudible 'Use me instead!'. 

And then I thought of just popping in the DVD again and clicked on that smiling wide icon in an attempt to launch some installation action but to no avail.

I hit the forums and found out that that smiling icon on the DVD was the entire application itself and all I had to do was drag it to my applications folder. I could even drag it to somwhere in my Mac and it would run from there.

Really now. This exercise made me feel a lot stupid ;)

yum! nope, it isn't Vanilla flavored cake much as I want it to be. Those two words are actually part of the new parlance I had no choice but to acquire in choosing to be a hackintosher.

Vanilla seems to pertain to the kernel version and kext, I've only discovered this fairly recently, means "kernel extension".

Right. All I know is that I had to download the appropriate kexts to get me running.

I am beginning to love OS X on my wind, or as I have christened it, "MacBook Wind".



Super cool dock, especially with the Stacks feature. And Exposé rocks!

But a learning curve is of course to be hurdled like discovering that I can make screenshots by pressing on command (which is Alt on my keyboard) + shift + 3.

This is not even a real Mac that I own. My OS X Leopard installation has to be doped with a plethora of kexts to even get it working. My hardware isn't 100% working.

Saying it isn't supported is a sugar coated permutation of saying it's forbidden.

My Mac Book Wind, a measly pearl white MSI Wind netbook, is my version of the chic and pricier Mac Book Air that Apple's touting as the ultimate ultra portable computer.

Yet I am still very much hooked in Mac OS X and as an example, I've invested in back issues of iCreate and Mac Life to gather more information on this enticingly sumptuous operating system that is new to me.

It's amazing to realize how it holds true that Apple is leagues, if not light years, ahead of the current PC market and short of providing apt justification for this conviction, look at the following words:

Spotlight
Quick Look
Time Machine
Cover Flow
iLife '08
iWork '08

I'm also constantly burying my nose in Leopard the Missing Manual by David Pogue to get up to speed with my new system.

Maybe I can blame my iPod for starting all this new madness?

After two previous netbooks, the Eee PC 701 and the Eee PC 900, I finally got the MSI Wind U100.

It's supposed to be the Linux version that I got from E-hub, which didn't include any OS when I bought it, not even Ubuntu. Apparently, the label "Linux version" meant "without any OS installed" for MSI. I remember having Xandros when I got my Eee PC's. Weird.

Anyway, a rundown on the specs first:

1.6 GHz Atom N270
1 GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB WD SATA
802.11 b/g
10" LED wide screen LCD
Webcam
Mic
No internal bluetooth

Pretty much the generic netbook specification. The unit set me a comfortable 19,999 Php. I would've have wanted the XP Home version which had the internal bluetooth module but the hard drive for that model's only 80 GB and costed 24,950 Php.

I figured out I'd rather have the bigger cappacity hard drive 19,999 Php model and then add a separate bluetooth usb dongle for a better deal.

After two previous netbooks, the Eee PC 701 and the Eee PC 900, I finally got the MSI Wind U100.

It's supposed the Linux version that I got from E-hub, which didn't include any OS when I bought it, not even Ubuntu. Apparently, the label "Linux version" meant "without any OS installed" for MSI. I remember having Xandros when I got my Eee PC's. Weird.

Anyway, a rundown on the specs first:

1.6 GHz Atom N270
1 GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB WD SATA
802.11 b/g
10" LED wide screen LCD
Webcam
Mic
No internal bluetooth

Pretty much the generic netbook specification. The unit set me a comfortable 19,999 Php. I would've have wanted the XP Home version which had the internal bluetooth module but the hard drive for that model's only 80 GB and cost24,950 Php.

I figured out I'd rather have the bigger capacity hard drive 19,999 Php model and then add a separate blue tooth USB dongle for a better deal. I was even inspired to buy Windows XP Home separately from E-hub too and the total cost came at only 23,799 Php, still cheaper.

Next I got the msiwindosx86 DVD from a fellow forumer as  I didn't have decent broadband connection at home and proceeded with the experiment.

(You can google for the msiwindosx86 ISO on the net for download)

Installation:

I didn't want to erase Win XP entirely yet and opted to dual boot. So bearing in mind what I read on the forums that I would have to partition my drive to create space for my new kitty, I resorted to:

1. boot up with Mandriva live CD, pretend to install it. I was able to resize my Windows partition and create a new partition on the drive, giving me 80 GB for Windows and another 80 GB for OS X.

2. That done, I rebooted the machine, held down F11 to get to my boot options. Swapped the Mandriva live CD with the msiwindosx86 DVD and chose my external DVD drive to boot from.

3. Some text appeared and I waited for about a couple of minutes before the OS X Installer GUI appeared. I chose the language and ran Disk Utility to format the partition I'd just created: HFS+journaled.

[gallery]

4. I then chose the partition, or as indicated by the installer program, "Drive" where I wanted to put Leopard.

5. I cancelled installer verification because I was so excited and the installation went through quite smoothly.

6. After about an hour, I was greeted with the Leopard welcome screen--it was breathtaking to see the word "welcome" fly across outer space my LCD in different language and with that equally cool background music. I think that was the moment I officially became an Apple fan girl

As I was running a mere hackintosh, Steve Job's "it just works" moniker does not hold 100% true for my OS X experience. I've had to search into nooks and crannies of forums all over the net and hack away for hours at the least up to days when things are just a jumble of spaghetti mess.

One thing thing that doesn't work out of the box even installing with the slip streamed custom installer that is msiwindosx86, are the webcam, WiFi, and mic.

But thanks to persistent people over at the msiwind.net forums, RealTek released a driver for the WiFi module in the MSI Wind.

I downloaded it from one of the links posted on the forums File sharing accounts would expire now and then so I'm not providing a link to download it. I suggest you hit the forums at msiwind.net and you'd find someone renewing the download links.

I was saved from having to buy a replacement compatible WiFi module and consequently from voiding my warranty by opening up my wind. And though I had to use the RealTek WLAN utility that was pesky enough to auto launch each and every login, I was a  happy camper.



The same happened more or less with my webcam:  it spit out only green garbage in Photo Booth. So, as usual, I hit the forums again, and was told to update my version Quick Time to the latest. I was skeptical since my mindset was on weird "take off the battery for a couple of minutes or so then put it back" etc, but I gave it a try and downloaded the latest Quick Time for mac from the apple.com and low and behold, I the next time I fired up Photo Booth, I saw my face plastered on the screen.

I was fortunate enough to have the Sonix webcam which turned out to be functional in OS X. Others with the Bison v .3 weren't as lucky.

Don't I just love the new Finder? I'm used to using iTunes 7 and 8 on my workstation PC at the office and I must say that this sidebar thing is great!

Couple that with Cover Flow view and Quick Look, and you'll wonder how ever you were able to manage without them.

Quick Look is a time saver as it allows me to get a peek at a file without having to open up an application. I'm head over heels!

However, it still just bewilders me each time I drag some files off of my iPod into one my Home folders to transfer them, but low and behold; when I drag and drop, OS X makes a copy of my files instead.

And then I drag and drop the docs from my Downloads folder to my Documents folder, and OS X moves them instead now. Weird.

It seems that dragging ang dropping between different disks is really copying but between locations in one and the same disk is really moving files. 

And apparently my computer vocabulary has to change too with moving to the Mac OS. Oh well.

This is a story of wanting. When kids go off to college, their folks normally give them computers to use for school stuff. I was no exception to that. However, perhaps due to the fact that this is a third world country we were living and continue to live in, if the normal american kid was bought a decent laptop, I was given a boring beige box which was, as I look at it now in our storage room, a monstrosity of a desktop.

Ok, before I become the incurable ingrate to those reading this post, I did appreciate that computer and Windows 98 that came with it. I doted on it with all my heart in fact as it was the first computer I had,  I was  free to do with exactly as whatever fancy hit me.

At 16, I started to become a computer loving nerd. The years that followed found me rummaging through piles of back issues of pcworld, pcmag, computer power user magazines at Book Sale stalls. That was one advantage of third world peeps: technology reaches us later than guys in US or Europe which means a 3 month old maximum pc mag would still be a good reference for what's up and about in the current market.

I remember picking up a copy of MacWorld along with Linux User and my all time fave, PC World. UP Diliman had switched to Linux when I entered the campus as a freshie and so an OS other than Windows is not as remote an idea to me as, let's say, Liechtenstein. In fact, OS's other than Windows have always intrigued me.

Thus, it when I flipped through the pages of MacWorld which touted all the glory that was OS X (still Tiger at that time), and saw the screenshots in between the article texts, the desire to get a feel of the Mac OS got lodged inside my unconscious, growing deep-seated with each passing year.

I was oggling at iBooks carried by my batch mates so much so that it didn't make any difference if I were actually drooling right there and then. Personally, I blame it all on the crescent-toothpaste-like blue globs that made up the buttons and scrolls, and Helvetica font.

Since then, I would regularly try out tons of Linux distros I got burned for me at the Computer Center. In fact, I'd developped a penchance on the Gnome environment over KDE as it resembled OS X better. I'd gotten as far as customizing my Gnome prefs to make my desktop imitate OS X simply because I didn't have enough moolah to burn for such an expensive iBook.

Then Apple moved to Intel and ditched the PPC architecture it held onto so stubbornly and so the chance of installing OS X on non-Apple Intel based hardware now held some promise.

In 2008, my dream of having a MacBook became possible—through a netbook, the MSI Wind