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 ;)

I just did what a broke person should not do: spend moolah when even her next payslip couldn't cover her bills as of date. But I had to give in to my inner geek and so after paying the internet connection bill, I ended up buying a 2 GB stick of DDR2 PC-667 RAM for my MacBook Mini. (Click here for that story)

The HP mini 1000 only has one SO-DIMM slot which is occupied by default by a 1 GB stick. Upgrading the Mini meant having the pre-installed 1 GB RAM all to the MacBook Wind. So with a screw driver in hand, I turned over the Wind and proceeded with loosening all 9 screws. And yes, I ignored the "Warranty void if seal is broken" sticker.

Dislodging the backing of the chassis was the most difficult part; the side where most of the ports are - VGA, mic, audio jack - is fairly stuck. I had to loosen the opposite side first and the whole backing came off with about a couple of clicks.



Putting in the new dimm stick was a breeze, just slide in the RAM stick at a 45 degree angle, matching the notch on the module's teeth with that of the slot. Then gently push it in and down. The two clips should be able to clasp the sides of the RAM module.

this is the 1 GB RAM I got from the HP Mini 1000

I closed up the Wind and proceeded to boot up OS X. I had the fright of my life!

Trackpad and keyboard weren't working so I had to plug in my external keyboard and mouse. I tried to log in but instead of being brought to my desktop, there was just my wallpaper with a spinning beach ball (of death).

Oh no! All my files were on the Wind, my mind was already figuring out a way to retrieve them if things should get worse. 

I forced the machine to shut down and re-booted it. 

This time, I had a functioning keyboard and trackpad.

Everything's now good. I clicked on the About Mac and verified that the system recognized the additional 1 GB which gave me a total of 2 GB all in all.

Now as to why there was that little quirk, I've absolutely no idea. This is hackintosh - it's expected.

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!

Same as my previous post before, that is how to get Quick Time Pro for Windows. This time go Pro with your Quick Time for Mac OS X.

Just see the images for details ;)







And voilà! You're Pro:



Supposedly works for 7.5 but as you can see, it also works for 7.6

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.

I followed Res' guide for creating a bootable HDD with OS X Leopard, sticking as closely as I could to the guide. That is; I used Universal Installer and stuff (his custom HP Mini plugin etc.). But I'm still getting kernel panics when I boot my HP Mini 1001TU off the HDD I just created.

It must be because I'm not using a Retailer DVD installer of OS X: yep, I'm still stuck with the two installer DVD's of yore. 

Seems I'm pretty much stuck with XP for now....

Ok. So, like my love life that's now officially vamoosed -- dead, I may have been severely over optimistic about the whole thing. But hey, I was able to put OS X on my roomie's Asus 1000H with nothing but my (previously) trusty msiwindosx86 DVD installer! I mean, it's just gotta work somehow - as sure as the sun rises every morning, being able to install Leopard with the msiwindosx86 DVD is inevitable. And perhaps even more than that, I believed it to be a fact.

Alright, so that wasn't exactly as easy as that --I did have to scourge the net for some clue until I stumbled upon the custom made bios from osrom.net -- but the main point is that I did it and as proof of that success, my roomie's perched on her bed right at this moment, transferring some songs off her "Eeepple-complete-with-Apple-sticker" to her still-virgin-never-been-jailbroken iPod Touch.

She's using the world's most advanced and most coveted (at least in my own opinion) OS in the whole face of this earth - on a black Asus 1000H!

And so now, the question is: Why am I staring into Windows Vista Home Premium? And my touchpad has gone berserk for the Nth time so I've to reboot for the Nth time again because of crappy driver support?

The Sentellic touchpad on my MSI Wind, I admit, feels as if it chugged down 10 venti Americana from Starbs but at least its "jerkiness" (as in literal jerky movement - erratic) after waking up from sleep goes off eventually and I hardly even notice it.

I've failed after many many heart breaking attempts at putting my beloved Leopard on my HP Mini 1001TU. I only get this pitiful and not to mention cryptic, line:

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

Kind of reminds of what a someone said in the movie "He's Just Not That Into You", that when guys dump girls, they try to deceive them with "I don't deserve you, baby". It sounds nice, but really, it just means he's dumping you.

Sugar-coating. Oh crap.

Last week, I decided to take a leave from work and, yup, I tinkered with my netbook. I tried to experiment with external monitors and graphics drivers just for kicks. I felt like it so I did it.

I was following a thread over at the msiwind.net forums and although I knew there was some issue with enabling mirroring mode, guess what? I still tried it.

Both displays conked out as soon as I enabled mirroring, I was seeing bars of shades of black and grey and then à la rainbow bright colors. In the end, I couldn't get past the blue screen even with the external monitor already disconnected. I tried what the forumers advised, removing some com.apple.windowserver.plist and so on files, but that still didn't solve my prob. 

So given the noob that I am, equipped with just guts and even lesser actual tech know-how,  I thought I'd reinstall. But my precious hackintosh files were still in the drive and I didn't have back up for them yet -- I was meaning to do it after the external monitor experiement but this tragedy happened. 

An idea struck me and so I took out my msiwindosx86 installation DVD, plugged in my iPod, booted from the DVD as if I were reinstalling. 

I was hanging all hopes on this one tactic: archive the files which were contained in a folder on my user's desktop to my main(root) /. And the copy the resulting archive to my iPod before I wiped out, once again for the Nth time, the entire content of the fairly used (and to some extent, abused) 160 GB WD SATA hard drive that came with the Wind.

Once I was in the installer window, I fired up Utilities > Terminal. 

Here is when I swish out my battered copy of Complete Linux. Ok, so what's Linux doing in this blog about Mac OS X? Well, it seems that knowledge of Linux commands is valuable if you wanna really get to know Mac OS X. Hey, OS X is Unix beneath the polished and posh Aqua interface and Linux is "Unix-like".

So here are the steps:

1) In the terminal :

tar cvf -f /Volumes/Macintosh HD/hackintosh.tar /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/username/Desktop/Hackintosh Resource

the -f is the flag for indicating that you want what's happening during the archive process to display in terminal.

cp /Volumes/hackintosh.tar /Volumes/iPod's name/

I don't like Calculator's looks. Not that it's ugly, the calc widget just looks better. But you're not able to access it in your desktop because its being held prisoner by Dashboard's "layer". When you're in Dashboard, the Desktop is dimmed and you'll have to leave the layer before you can get back to what you were working on. 

Now of course you've heard about tweaks, some as simple as downloading an app and some requiring mucking around in Terminal. But one solution I've recently discovered; Deeper

What's so nice about Deeper is that it's developed by the same people who brought us Onyx and that it provides tweaking options not just for this specific issue but tons of others as well. This isn't saying that what the other options do is mediocre or isn't as effective; it just saves you from the trouble of installing separate different apps for the different tweaks you wanna do. 

You can access a lot of settings for OS X that you didn't know was possible or thought was available exclusively via Terminal (command lines, yuuuuckh!) and this through a UI that's beautifully integrated with Leopard-ish looks for the meticulous purists.

To free your widgets, just check the box for "Enable the Developer Mode of Dashboard"

To get a widget crossover to your desktop "layer", you gotta rescue it first from Dashboard by hitting F12, choose your desired widget, and then, while still dragging the widget, press on F12 again and voilà! 



Now, the process of liberating widgets may not be as clearly defined as I would want it to be but you'll get a hang of it once you try it yourself.

And the widgets, by the way, are not affected by Exposé nor Spaces, in that they stay at the exact same spot whether you press F9 (they don't get shooed to some less conspicuous position on the screen) or switch space (the widgets simply follow your lead).

Here, I tried clear up my Desktop but the widgets did not budge a milimeter. (I deliberately moved the sticky notes widget to cover something I don't want to be captured in this screenshot)

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.

Maybe I should already get me a real Mac. But I can't, don't have enough cash on me to pay for one, even on 0% installment basis (my S.I.P doesn't allow me that amount). Now with the looming probability - yep, not just possibility - of me joining the pool or poor Cunem-yuppie's (Currently Unemployed Young Profesionals), I'm in no ready state to be swiping that credit card any time within this decade or so. In short, no real MacBook for me.

But that doesn't prevent me from pretending to be a true blue Apple fangirl and my latest achievement is: TADA! My own MobileMe account courtesy of the free trial offer by yours sincerely, Apple Inc. One Infinity Loop, Cupertino, CA.

Now I have my own "@me.com" account! Isn't that grand?

Well the only reason I risked my credit card number (you need to input a bonafide credit card number to sign up even for the free trial) is to be able to use iChat. The prereq is a .mac account which has been superceded by MobileMe nowadays so I took the plunge. It is well stipulated that I'd only be billed once my 60-day trial period has expired and that I can just deactivate my account if I didn't want to pay 148 SGD or around PhP 5,000. It's true that by deactivating my MobileMe account, I won't be able to use the mail and the storage space but I'd still have an iChat ID. So far, so good.

Edit:

I was totally wrong (and stupid) to actually assume that a MobileMe account and a .Mac account are the same and one! Geesh! I'm getting an AIM screen name to use iChat. Although, I must admit, the MobileMe experiment rocked! :D

And what do I do with all that trial space up in Apple cloud? Hmmm....



Yep. I'm storing my hackintosh files. Kinky ! ;)

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.

Color me prejudiced. Apparently Quick Silver is a shining beacon -- or better yet, the shining beacon -- in the world of Mac users / geeks. Perhaps my being only a Hackintosh user / geek is reason for the lack of that certain X factor determinant of the aforementioned species. Or perhaps having another "Menulet" crowd my menubar is just purely disgusting to me. 

But for what its worth, I've to get used to Quick Silver cause it's what I'm gonna live with from now on if I want to be able to use headphones on my MacBook Wind.

You see, on the MSI Wind, the headphone jack is one of the things that don't play well with OS X. But the good news is that people obviously smarter than me (and thank God they are) have come up with this great workaround involving a script called "switch.sh".

You run the script to switch audio channel from speakers to headphones and vice versa. In a nutshell, it does the duty that plugging in or unplugging your pair of earbuds should accomplish automatically.

Normally this could be done via terminal but that would entail typing command lines which yours truly is bound to forget and which is an error prone process altogether. There's an option where you create the script as an app and then you give it a nice icon and then you run it every time you wanna switch. The problem is, the app actually sits in your dock. Not that I mind it taking space in there; I've already learned to live with the nuisance that is the Realtek WLAN Utility but that I'd had to click it as well. I prefer a keyboard shortcut -- for some reason my brain remembers those, probably from muscle memory mostly.

And guess what, Quick Silver makes it possible to do just that. Oh well, if this were an arranged marriage, I guess I'd have to play my part until the AppleHDA / VooDoo team at the msiwind.net forums releases the much awaited fix that would let us, avid MSI Wind hackintoshers, use the headphones in the usual no-script-just-plug-and-unplug way and also the internal mic.

Here's the guide (taken from msiwind.net forums) :

1) Download this package which contains the switch.sh script and CHUD, and download Quick Silver here
2) Unzip the package anywhere you want. Me, I saved it in my Downloads folder first.
3) Install CHUD and install Quick Silver.
4) Save the switch.sh script in /Users/your username/Library.

5) Launch Terminal and type this command lines:

cd Library
chmod 755 switch.sh

6) After exiting Terminal, launch Script Editor - it's in the AppleScript sub-folder in your Applications folder - but I just command + spacebar and start the app via Spotlight (which is easier in my opinion).
7) Type this:

do shell script "Users/your username/Library/switch.sh" user name "your username" password "your password" with administrator privileges

8) Hit the Compile button -- the one with the Hammer then go to the menubar: File > Save as and name your script. I followed what the original guide author did and named mine "HeadPhones". Put it in the "main" or "root" /Library/Scripts folder like so;

9) Launch Quick Silver
10) Now here is when I get too lazy to write so you follow the photo story:

You can just drag n' drop the actual script file in the box in Quick Silver

 

Click on the small (microscopic) gear icon to the right to access the drop menu from you select "Triggers"

Customize your trigger key by clicking on the line under "Trigger" column.

 

Click on Edit and the field should flash.
From thence you can type the key trigger combination you want. I made mine "alt + S" ("S" for switch :D)

Make sure that Quick Silver is launched at login. You can do this in Quick Silver: Preferences > check "Start at login" > uncheck: Warn before, Enable advanced, Show icon in dock, and Show icon in menu bar.

You can remove it in your dock by hold clicking on the app icon and then click on "Remove from Dock".

And from then on, you can happily just hit alt + S (or whatever your trigger is) to toggle from internal speakers in earphones :D

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.

iBook G4 14" LCD

1.4 GHz G4
512MB RAM
60GB ATA/100 4200 rpm
Slot-Loading SuperDrive DVD±RW/CD-RW
14.1-inch (diagonal) TFT XGA
ATI Mobility Radeon 9550
Wi-Fi 802.11g & Bluetooth 2.0
Mac OS X version 10.4 Tiger

For Php 20,000

Or I could get the HP Mini 1000 for PhP 21,995 but this isn't really as compatible as the Wind is to OS X.

I knew it was a bad idea to stop by at the local mall where gadgets, specifically netbooks, abound like popcorn in movie houses. But what could a mere, netbook-lover/addict, like me do? There was simply no fighting the urge so I followed my feet where they led me.

That's when I came face to face with the HP Mini 1000. 

The moment was just as fatal as the day I met the first guy I ever had a crush on and have loved (though secretly now) ever since. My heart beat faster. Clearly, I was smitten and fallen beyond redeem for this netbook:

And I know I should be more reasonable but the only thing that's stopped me from getting it on impulse is if I'd be able to run OS X Leopard on it or not.

I've always known that the MSI Wind is by far the best netbook hackintosh to be had with its unparalleled compatibility with OS X Leopard thanks to the hardwork of people like Stellarola et. al. over at the msiwind.net forums. And with this reminder in my head, I've been sane enough to keep my credit card safe in my wallet.

But reading this has changed my view completely, and quite drastically.

I've been patient over and over again with the MSI Wind so much so that it's become MacBook Wind in these last months. What with the absolutely gorgeous looks of the HP Mini 1000, and some luck, I think I can endure anything just to transform it into a MacBook Mini.

Should I buy or not? Oh, if only netbooks were free.

So here I am with this latest post, chronicling my experience with installing OS X Leopard on two different machines, the Asus 1000H and the MSI Wind. Both run OS X Leopard great but based on my experience, the MSI Wind, though lacking in "aesthetics" points (depending on each's own opinion) gives the more pleasant OS X experience in that I'd had significantly more trouble installing the OS in the Asus 1000H.

Just see my previous post. 

True, the webcam on the Asus 1000H may be less laggy than the one on the MSI Wind, provided that it isn't one of those nasty Bison v .03's which aren't compatible at all, but the over all user experience is albeit better on the Wind. 

As far as I'm concerned it's only the internal mic that's still totally not working on the Wind. It's the same case as in the Asus 1000H, but with the Wind, you get the volume, brightness, and all the other fn + Fx controls working after doing an install from the msiwindosx86 DVD. With the Asus, you gotta do some further hacking and it ain't easy.

I didn't even bother to get the controls working on my roomie's 1000H because that would mean another significant dent in my time schedule. True, as it is ,my hackintosh skills are hardly acceptable so I may just not have the ability to do that but it's undeniable that the said task does require working on.

Another thing is sound. Okay, what about audieee? Sure that did wonders and my roomie can now even use her iPod's earphones with her Eeepple 1000H (that's what she's decided to call her hackintosh) and I couldn't use it without even installing CHUD first and then running some scripts in Terminal etc...

But the main point of the fact is that without audieee, the 1000H's internal speakers wouldn't work at all. And audieee at that wouldn't have perfomred the big miracle it did without having to install the Developer Tools on the 1000H first. 

Perhaps all this is becoming a pain in the eyes to read and a lot more painful to the brain to process for it to make any sense at all so here's a better summary:

After installation from msiwindosx86 DVD :

MSI Wind

*No preps needed. Boot from DVD and install

What works right away:
1) Sound through internal speakers
2) Correct resolution 1028 x 600
3) Trackpad
4) Keyboard
5) Sleep (close lid and system automatically goes to sleep, press power button to wake-up)
6) Control keys (brightness, volume, etc.)
7) Bluetooth (both built-in or dongle/usb type)

What works but requires tweaking (fixes enclosed in parentheses):
1) Webcam (Sonix, update Quick Time to 7.5 or latest)
2) WiFi (download and install corresponding WLAN Utility)
3) Audio via headphone jack (follow guide here) (it's actually for the Lenovo S10 but it's the same procedure)

Asus 1000H 

1) Pre-installation requirement : Do not install patched kernel
2) Bypass setup by doing this trick:
after installation, during boot up, hit any key to stall default booting into OS X, at the prompt:

-s
/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
touch /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

of course, you enter these lines one by one. Get a better idea of what to do with a guide with pics here

What works right away:
1) Correct resolution 1028 x 600
2) Trackpad
3) Keyboard
4) *Sleep (not verified)
5) Webcam
6) bluetooth

What works but requires tweaking (fixes enclosed in parentheses):
1) Webcam (Sonix, update Quick Time to 7.5 or latest)
2) WiFi (download and install WLAN utility)
3) Audio via headphone jack (follow guide here)
4) Controls (brightness, volume, etc.  might work by researching here) * not confirmed