My MacBook Wind

Whenever I install OS X on my netbooks, I would always stop with the Mac OS X Setup Assistant and not opt to register my "Macs". They weren't real Macs anyway plus I haven't installed the correct kexts to be able to connect to the internet. I'd end up having an alias file in my home directory; the one with the Tux.

With my LAN port working perfectly fine, I ventured to push it one step further; register with Apple:

Of course I didn't sign up for Mobile Me trial.

I'll definitely enjoy using my Apple computer ;)

At long last! I posted about this news on my MacBook Wind blog. I've actually been enjoying VooDooHDA for a few weeks now (hold on, maybe that's already a month?).

This is the promise to set us free from the bondage of having to use the switch.sh script which has been all but canonized in that it let us Wind Hackintoshers channel audio to our fave pair of (battered and tattered) earphones or to an external speaker for the sake of "pumping it louder"!

Okay, so before I sound like I wanted to rival the book of Revelations with this post,

1) download the VooDooHDA kext here and unpack the kexts.

2) Go to your /System/Libray/Extensions/ to delete all kexts with the text "AppleHDA" in their filenames.

3) And while you're there, delete the "Caches" folder

4) Go up one level, which brings you to /System/Library/ to delete "Extensions.mkext"

You'll be prompted to input your password in all of these deletions, by the way.

5) Launch Kext Helper b7 (or your fave kext installer app) and then install the kexts. Reboot when prompted.

If all goes well, you should be able to boot up in OS X and everything else will be as if nothing happened. The feature presentation will be when you plug in your earphones into audio jack in the Wind, sound is automatically channeled through them - sans divine intervention from the infamous "switch.sh".

Ideally, the Wind's internal mic should also work with this kext but that's not what happened in my case. Anyway, this is still in beta so we've a lot to go, but a good sign still. This same VooDooHDA kext works wonders for the HP Mini 1001TU - I can now watch my movies on my MacBook Mini! Hurray! :D

Thanks and good job to the VooDooHDA team - you guys rock!

It's been a long while since I last updated this site - been busy in the "beauty department" hence the 1 month hiatus in the "nerd land" - but I'm back.

Remember that " Try and try until you burn out" post? Well this entry's got plenty to do with that topic. I'd been attempting to install OS X on my HP Mini 1000 by going with the bootable usb, or in my case, bootable external hard drive. I'd spent many a sleepless night trying every trick under my sleeve to get past that nasty "Mac framework successfully initialized" blah blah but to no avail.

I thought maybe I was just unlucky that way or I just had to get myself a Retail OS X Leopard DVD installer or iDeneb v1.3 like what everyone on the forums were doing. And so I got a Retail OS X Leopard DVD - there was a Tiger mac that needed to be upgraded to Leopard anyway so I thought I'd use the DVD myself for this little experiment.

I began trudging on, only to find myself bumping head first on to a wall - a very hard wall at that. My DVD drive flashed me I/O errors after 35 minutes into the project. Argghhh!!

I was stuck with the old iDeneb image I had stored in my Wind's hard drive. I read through Res' instructions from insanelymac and lo and behold; I found out where I'd tripping and didn't know I was even tripping before.

It turned out I always went directly to installing the HP mini plugin in Universal Installer, skipping OS X essentials plugin.



This time, I made sure I went through the OS X essentials plugin step of the how-to and low and behold: it booted.

Now my main problem is that aside from the keyboard, which I really adore of the HP Mini 1000, and a squashed 800 x 600 resolution, I didn't have anything else worth mentioning in my setup.

Does WiFi work? Although there's an Airport menulet in the menubar (now how redundant is that?), I've no way of verifying since we don't have a WiFi router at home.

Bluetooth? OS X asked for a bluetooth mouse - I plugged in my usb optical mouse but it wasn't recognized rebooting with it plugged in already caused the system to hang - but I didn't have a bluetooth mouse so I wouldn't know. Pairing with my cellphone would be pushing it, I thought.

The weirdest thing is that I'm getting an error message each time I get to the desktop.

"The system extension "name of kext" was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling, or contact the product's vendor for an update"

After trying to manually install the kexts; that is, replacing stuff from the /System/Library/Extensions folder and then deleting the /System/Library/Extensions/Caches folder along with the Extensions.mkext file with still the same original lame result, I'm fed up.

I'm not gonna bother trying to go further with this so I'm downloading iDeneb v1.3 now. I'm through part 8 of the entire series of .rar files. Maybe within this weekend, I'll be able to test.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

In my past post, I talked about how Apple's DVD Player would not cooperate and let me get that sought after "Apple experience" - it just keeps on churning out that error message whenever I try to launch the app.

It's like asking a guy out and getting "No" for an answer. Miserable.

Well, the guy still refuses to notice me (I refuse to accept that it's due to my physical appearance - or lack thereof) but DVD Player finally succumbed to my insistence.

Here's how:

1) Download 0xED from the Apple website and then install it on your system.

2) In Finder, on the menubar, go to this directory:

/System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A



3) Copy the file "DVDPlayback" to your Desktop, for example. Then make a backup again somewhere else.



4) Open the "DVDPlayback" in 0xED.





5) In 0xED, on the search field (marked by a Spotlight icon), type in the word "Internal".



6) Hitting Enter will take you to the occurrences of this word in the file. Replace all 4 occurrences of "Internal" with the word "External". Be careful with replacing them but if you screw up, at least you've got that backup DVDPlayback file, right? ;)



7) Save DVDPlayback and copy it back to its original location :



/System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A

What it does basically is to tell your system to look for an external DVD drive from now and not an internal one. This is what 0xED, a hex editor, helps you to do by editing the DVDPlayback file for you without learning machine parlance.

DVD Player should now start and operate fine. Just be sure your USB external DVD drive is plugged in and you're good to go.

Stubborn people just never give up on getting OS X Leopard to work on their HP Mini 1000. And some stupid stubborn people just won't download the dang iDeneb v3 10.5.5 (which is the way to go according to sources) either from torrent or rapidshare or megaupload because they don't have a decent net connection that's fast enough to handle the genormous 3.5 GB or up of this DVD installer.iso file. 

So what do stupid stubborn people with only a dated msiwindosx86 and iDeneb 10.5.4 that wouldn't even boot, do?

They try and try until they succeed burn out. Which is what this one exactly stupid stubborn person did over the last weekend:

Create an OS X Leopard Installer out an external HDD.

Disclaimer: exactly stupid stubborn person, me, did not think up this brilliant idea; I got it from here.

What you need: HP Mini's bios should be F.05 for this to work according to sources.

1) A working Mac. I don't have a real Mac so I used my MacBook Wind which is currently happily running OS X 10.5.6.

2) External hard drive. I ripped off my ancient lappie's 20GB ATA (yes, ATA, not SATA) and dumped into one of those cheapo 2.5" external HDD cases.

3) Retail OS X Leopard DVD Installer. Again, I don't have this nor can I download it, so I'm left with my msiwindosx86 and iDeneb-10.5.4-I-think DVD's.

4) Universal installer from PCWiz (I'm totally digging this site!)

5) HP Mini plugin for Universal Installer. This one's from Res over yonder at insanelymac.com. This plugin should be saved in the "Universal installer/Motherboards" folder.

6) Leopard 10.5.6 combo update from the Apple website.

 

What to do:

1) Plug in the external HDD to the mac and then launch the app "Disk Utility".

2) Partition the external HDD as GUID partition and format Mac OS Extended (journaled). 

- In the Disk Utiliy window, at the left side, click on the external HDD's icon (usually depicted as a yellow-orange disk), 

- At the right side, you click on the tab called "Partition". (If you don't see the tab, then you're not on the "main" external HDD. Click on the first, upper most yellow-orange disk icon and at the right of your Disk Utility window should change accordingly to show the tab).

- In the drop-down menu, choose 1 Partition. Give it a name. System automatically give you "Untitled 1" by default. (Quite imaginative huh?)



 

- Click on the "Options" button. This will bring up a menu. Choose the radio button that says "GUID Partition Table". Click on OK.



- Back on the main window, click on the "Apply" button. You can now close Disk Utility.

3) Insert and mount the OS X DVD installer and then launch the app "Terminal"

4) In Terminal, type this line:

cd /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages

Or, if you're using msiwindosx86 DVD:

cd /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD Slipstream/System/Installation/Packages

5) Hit Enter and next, type this line: 

open osinstall.mpkg

6) Hit Enter. The Mac OS X Installation program should start, showing you a window. Just choose your external HDD.

7) If you're using Retail OS X DVD Installer, skip this step. If you're using a iDeneb or any customized OS X Installer DVD, before starting the actual installation, click on the "Custom" button and uncheck Kernel patches and other stuff, like additional languages to save space and time during installation.

8) After installation is done, double click on the 10.5.6 combo update package and select the external HDD. 

9) Start Universal Installer. (You should've installed the tools/utilities on your Mac when you started this)

 

From Res's guide: 

*You're now in the Universal Installer window

1) Change HD to your USB device. 

2) Select motherboard package with X86_Essentials and select apply kext package then click install. 

3) Select motherboard package with HP_mini_1000_F.05-10.5.6. 

4) Select apply kext package and DSDT patch. 

5) select ethernet EFI string and EFI string for video card (intel GMA 950). 

6) Click install. 

7) Select PC-EFI V9 then click install again. (In order to reduce the possibility that PC-EFI could be installed not correctly. I prefer to install it separately.)

8) Launch DiskUtility and fix the permission of your USB device. Done. 

9) Now, congratulation, you have made a bootable USB device. Reboot your computer with F9 and select your USB device as boot disk then boot with "-v -f". Now you are able to boot into your OSX on your USB device.

What I did after my Step #8 because I wasn't able to download Universal Installer and Res' HP Mini plugin for Universal Installer.

1) Launch OSX86 Tools Utility. Get it from PCWiz Computer site.

2) Click on "Intall EFI/Run FDISK" button. It'll ask you some questions (I, in particular, don't understand what they're talking really about) so just OK it and type your password when it asks you so.

3) A new smaller window will come up. In it, click on the "Run script" button. Again, just type your password and hit Enter to confirm if you're asked to.

4) Terminal will open. Confirming what you're about to do. Just hit Enter or "y" then Enter. It will present you with a list of actions to do. Choose 4 (Chameleon EFI) and press Enter.

5) It'll take a couple of seconds then you'll see a list of drives in your system. Usually, the external HDD will be listed as disk1. So just type "1" and hit Enter.

6) You'll see some texts running in the Terminal window and then a confirmation that you're done. Close Terminal and you should now have a bootable external HDD with OS X in it.

But since I didn't exactly follow Res' guide, especially the part with the Universal Installer and HP Mini plugin involved, I did not succeed at all and got stuck at the exact line I was dreading.

"MAC framework successfully initialized using 5242 buffer headers and 4096 cluster IO buffer headers."

Bleh. Well, at least I still have one more straw at this by downloading the Universal Installer and Res' HP Mini plugin before I quit being stupid and stubborn and just get iDeneb 10.5.5.

I voted in a poll over at msiwind.net for OS -- I assume, by OS, they mean the OS you're running on your Wind and here's an interesting discovery:



Mac OS X is finally getting ahead of Windows -- well, in this kind of game, at least.

And the charade goes on; me, being the Mac/Apple fan girl wannabe, downloaded Mactracker. I even downloaded two versions: one for my MacBook Wind (oh, don't I love saying that name!) and one for my Windows office PC. 

Mactracker is great application for learning about Macs. It's sort of a Mac history book if you will, offering information on the different Mac models that ever graced the surface of this earth ever since Steve Jobs, then in his early 20's, took out the first Macintosh from its bag and let it stay "hi" to the audience.

It even plays for you the Start Up and Death chimes of the different models. Cool.

My MacBook Wind has chosen to be very taciturn especially during start up and it's only because of Mactracker that I ever knew what it sounds like when just woken up.

Anyhow, of all the reasons why I think this is important to blog, this picture below is the catalyst of it all:

It thinks that my MacBook Wind, which is a mere hackintosh, is an Air! Ooooh... Not bad, not bad.

Argh!!!

Why didn't I see this one first? I hate Quick Silver and I hate it still! I thought I had to marry the guy and so I did and had little non-descript scripts such as "HeadPhones" and "switch.sh" litter my Macintosh HD, thinking all the while that this was necessary!

But it turns out that I could've opted for Audieee on my wind as well :(

And I wouldn't have had to go through the longish process of setting up what I had now had I unearthed the thread sooner.

It turns out that all I needed in the first place was the Audieee version customized for the MSI Wind (it was originally it was meant for the Eee PC hence the 3 e's in the utility's name) and CHUD.

And two steps at that:
1) Download CHUD and audieee4wind
2) Install CHUD and audieee4wind. Forget about the switch.sh included in the package

Great....

I recently discovered that I can streamline my "emptying the trash ritual" by subtracting one step from it; "Empty Trash securely".

Just open Finder's preferences (easiest is by pressing command + , )

Enable option "Empty Trash securely". Close it. And the next time you open Trash in Finder, this is what you get:

Now if only I can find out the equivalent of "Shift + Del" on Windows on OS X.

According to news from cultofmac.com, Psystar, the Apple clone maker which Apple itself has sued is given a second shot at proving that the Cupertino based company "misused its copyright".

I'm thinking of the Apple EULA: "Thou shalt not defile OS X by installing it on (inferior) hardware (i.e. PC's) that does not bear the Apple logo..."

Now I don't know much about software legal stuff but it seems, at least in the US, that a company cannot link its software copyright to its own hardware. Ultimately what this means for the hackintosh community is that there may come a day and time that one can buy OS X from Apple with the freedom to install it on any hardware one has -- on a toaster perhaps? Then we can have an iToaster? Ok, I should stop since I'm no longer being funny.

Seriously, if Psystar wins, I'd say it's good news. Consumers will have more choice in hardware and the OS X experience can be brought to the masses. But what about Apple? At least it gets its share of fame and viruses as well when it hits that crucial market share that makes it a profitable target for malicious computer hackers. 

Hey, Apple fanboys out there, I do love Apple but I also can't help but laugh at the silliness of this comic strip from ctrl+alt+del  ;)



Read the story here

So I was browsing for free apps, particularly free games at the apple website (idle hands to be blamed solely for this) and look what I found:

Not freeware?

Just fiddling with my beloved MacBook Wind again during the weekend. I decided to give coconutBattery a try.

Here's what I get:

My MacBook Wind is apparently already 6.5 something years old if we do the math :) And I only got my MSI Wind September last year.

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". 

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.