Installation of OS X 10.5.6 on a PC

June 8th, 2009 Comments

The following is my geeky chronicle of installing OS X 10.5.6 on my PC Hardware from start to finish.

Recently an old HP laptop of mine decided that it was time to die, leaving me with no means of being a web surfing couch potato.  Instead of bothering with figuring out which component went to hardware heaven, I decided it was time to purchase a new laptop that didn’t run so frustratingly slow when trying to play a game.  Since I was under the spell of Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field, I decided to finally buy an Apple computer, and optted for one of those aluminum unibody Macbooks.  I’ve been pleased with it since I bought it, and after a few hours of delta training myself from how OS X works vs Windows, I’ve been able to adjust pretty easily.

I’m not going to list the various deserved praises that OS X has over Windows, or vice-versa, but briefly, there were a few reasons for me deciding to try to put OS X on my PC hardware.  I fit their strategy of the “walled garden“.  I owned enough existing components (iPhone & AppleTV) of Apple’s offerings where this seemed to be the next logical progression.  I was able to get rid of Picassa, and migrate to iPhoto, tie to to my Contacts, etc, etc.  This left me wanting to get my PC on board with all the new toys goodness, and ultimately get some space back on my Macbook by migrating the disk-heavy media (Photos, Movies, Music) onto my PC.

I did some research on the Internet, and what first became apparent is that the methods to get OS X on your PC have changed so radically over the last 2 or 3 years, that unless you are reading under a current context, you will go down the wrong rabbit hole of tutorials.  I learned a few things to ignore, mostly posts about OS X Tiger (10.4.x) and the whole SSE2/SSE3 kernel hacks, since I had modern hardware.  There are also tutorials that will mention EFI emulation so that you can run a “Vanilla” kernel (basically an unhacked “holy grail” installation that is patch/hack free).  This requires actually successfully installing OS X onto your PC at least once to even get to that point, at least in my experience.  The Insanely Mac forums has been a great resource to put it all together.  After reading and figuring out what to ignore (anything before mid 2008, mostly), I decided to try using a pre-configured “release” install.  There are several out there (Kalyway, iPC, iDeneb, etc), and your mileage may vary.  There is also a method called Boot-132 which seems promising in that it theoretically will allow you to configure an initial boot CD that you boot from and then use a Retail OS X DVD install disc to do your installation, thus giving you a clean installation.

It is very important that you know your hardware configuration before even trying to do this, so let me preface my progress with my hardware configuration.  I am running an Intel DG965WH motherboard, and an NVidia 8800GT card.  It’s as basic as they come.  I was able to derive my SATA and Audio chipset from the motherboard model, so make sure you know these basic things beforehand.

My first attempt to get the installation to try the Boot-132 method.  There is a Boot-132 maker out there that will attempt to ease the creation of the boot CD.  There are also pre-made Boot-132 .ISOs (the version I ran across required a Mac) out there that are supposed to offer “noob” support.  I opted for the pre-configured disc.

I put the CD in and fired up the PC.  I got to a Darwin bootloader prompted, and following the tutorial, swapped the CD with a retail copy of OS X 10.5.6, and hit Enter.  I got excited when I got the grey Apple loading screen, followed by an OS X installation background, complete with the beachball.  After the installer finished initializing, it then informed me that I was not allow to install OS X on this computer.  Doh!  I then downloaded some other Boot-132 preconfigured CD, with the same results.  (In hindsight, I believe either image may have worked after changing a piece of hardware, read on for what that was)

Frustrated, I decided to try a “release” version of the installation.  I randomly decided on the Kalyway 10.5.3 release.  I booted straight off of the DVD, and it let me on to the Installation wizard.  Score!  The installation was rather painless, and completed in about 20 minutes.  I pop the DVD out, let the PC reboot, and get a grey Apple loading screen, yay!  I wait a minute or two, and end up getting the ghostbusters circle with slash through it.  At this point, I don’t know what that means I do more Googling.

I find out that by booting from one of my Boot-132 CDs that brings you to a Darwin bootloader prompt, that I could boot the OS in verbose mode (-v) so I could see what was going on.  Turned out I got the very common “waiting for boot device…” error.  More Googling ensued and it turned out that OS X does not like IDE DVD drives.  (This may not be true with all releases, but I decided to see if it mattered.)  I made a trip to Best Buy and picked up a SATA DVD drive and put that in my computer.  It booted into an OSX post-installation wizard.  Yay!  (I currently believe this may have allowed my first attempt using Boot-132 to work in hindsight).

The first step of the wizard had me identifying my keyboard by hitting buttons on my keyboard next to my shift buttons, and worked fine.  I then was asked if I wanted to import my MobileMe settings, which I said no, because I figured that it would try to get online and blow up since I was pretty sure my network adapter was not working yet.  Even though I had selected the no option, when clicking next, the wizard hung and would go no further.  More Googling told me to try to disable Firewire on my BIOS.  I did so, and booted back in, and was able to get to the next stop of the wizard.  Cool.  Weird, but cool.

My first test was to see if I could even get my network, audio, and graphics working properly.  This introduced me to .kexts.  A .kext is a kernel extension, the closest analogue to that of a driver in the Windows world.  To spare me from bouncing between my laptop for internet and my PC, I optted to get network working first.  This went pretty painlessly by Googling for it and found an Intel networking kext that enabled my Internet.  I then tried getting my NVidia card to work by using an injector called NVInstaller.  NVInstaller appeared to work, as I was able to get the resolution to change.  Audio proved to be much more frustrating, more on that later.  Things seemed to be going well, so I tried to install World of Warcraft on it to test out the graphics acceleration.  This was a fail.  The disk i/o would get progressively slower and slower during the install and ultimately stopped.  The DVD drive was unresponsive.  I chalked this up to something wrong with the Kalyway release and tried to install the Kalway 10.5.4 addon patch, hoping this would help.  I installed the patch, and rebooted, only to get the circle with slash ghostbusters symbol again, totally screwing my install.  I called it a night and opted to continue the next day.

The following day, with the confidence of knowing my hardware could technically boot OS X, I looked for a different release that was more current.  I picked iPC 10.5.6 Universal (AMD and Intel) which was the most recent version at the time.  Since this, 10.5.7 is now the most recent, but this was still closer than Kalyway 10.5.3.  iPC’s installer offered more options during install, such as pre-choosing which kexts to install, as well as power-saving fixes, etc.  This release did not need me to disable firewire, as Kalyway’s did.  The install took only 10 minutes and I was at the desktop.  This install also pre-loaded my network kexts with no problem.

I then used NVInstaller to get my video going, and installed World of Warcraft and patched it current.  I tried to get into the game to test the 3D acceleration, only to be told my card did not support 3D acceleration.  Dang.  More Googling pointed me to a different injector called NVKush.  I tried NVKush and WOW started up without issue.  Heck yeah.  But no sound.

Sound proved to be very painful.  My audio chipset was a Sigmatel 9271D.  I was unable to track this kext down initially, but tried the 9271, but it was not compatible.  I finally was able to track one down on the Insanely Mac forums, but I was not able to download any attachments from there.  Found out I had to donate to the forums to download files.  Fair enough, $10 later I was able to download the kext and get it working.  For those with other Sigmatel chipsets, there is a painful tutorial on how to patch your HD Audio kext by booting to a Linux ISO and extracting the codec info to a .txt file.

Long story short, I now had the kexts and injectors to install OSX using iPC 10.5.6 after much Googling and headache.  I have had no problems getting updates from Apple (except 10.5.7, I’ve heard it can mess stuff up, but I’ll try it one day).  I’ve also tried the iDeneb 10.5.6 release and I’ll say that its installation options are more comprehensive and offer better explanations of all the options over iPC.  With all these releases, this still gets back to the matter of getting a “Vanilla” install without relying on releases, aka the holy grail of installs.

This gets back to the EFI bootloader.  iPC installed Chameleon 1.x (can’t remember which version).  Basically a an EFI bootloader emulates the EFI of a real Mac.  EFI is basically the natural progression/replacement of the traditional BIOS.  This bootloader will also allow you to place your kexts in /Extras/Extensions instead of /System/Library/Extensions.  This is unique in that updating your OS will not screw up your hacked kext files.  This also theoretically means that you can wipe your OS and install off a retail DVD.  It’s just getting the kexts into /Extras/Extensions that requires you to have OS X installed or access to a mac that can place them in there.

What I’m not clear on is if /Extras/Extensions is mapped to the 200MB EFI partition that was made and it’s just transparent to me, or if it’s part of the same Volume as my OS.  I’m nervous to try to wipe my install and see for myself.  I’ll see what happens after making a backup.

After it’s all said and done, my installation works just like a real Mac with no problem.  It was definitely cheaper than buying a real Mac, but I just can’t justify the price of the hardware premium that Apple puts on them.

Hopefully this long chronicle will help anyone that is Googling for help on getting a running Hackintosh.  Good luck if you are, and drop me a comment and maybe I can help.

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I wonder if this means my blog themes require a transport and TMS system…

May 19th, 2009 Comments

http://itsinsider.com/2009/05/18/the-s-in-sap-stands-for-systems-not-social/

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2008++;

January 6th, 2009 Comments

This is less a material posting, and more of an update for those who know me and not those that are searching for SAP Netweaver cracks, etc.  (Weird what comes up in my referrer logs as search keywords!).

 

I’ve been afflicted with the holidays ADD syndrome, where I’ve failed to focus on anything at any length.  I’ve become engaged to my near 3-year girlfriend, played with ExtJS, done some crazy JSON stuff, and began learning Java in the Eclipse IDE.  Throw in some Guitar Hero, alcohol, friends, family, etc, and that sums up my Holiday Season.  Oh, and some new socks!

 

I still intend on writing about my misadventures with SAP Netweaver, but my pacing has never been too consistent.  I guess an honest way of describing me, is a “half-asser”.  I’ll have grand plans for an awesome great this or that, only to get about 40% into it before I see something shiny somewhere else, leaving my other projects to gather dust indefinitely.  These types of unfinished projects range from:

 

  • Creating a tutorial/blog set on standing up an SAP NW installation to self-learn on.  I mean, I know how, and know what BASIS tweaks to do, etc., but just lack the drive to write it all out.  (But if anyone stumbles upon this blog and has any specific questions, ASK!  I WILL answer.)
     
  • Creating a (shudder) AJAX application framework where the need to code the presentation is abstracted in an understandable OOP sort of way.  I’ve started and re-started this so many times, only to realize that people who actually have attention spans have already implemented this bigger and better, while I can’t be bothered to completely learn another framework.  I’m looking at you, ExtJS!  ( http://www.extjs.com – It really is a wonderful thing for Web Apps once you “get it”).
     
  • Java.  Whether one thinks it’s bloated or not, corporations seem to be embracing/have already embraced it (it, being J2EE, mostly).  Whether that embrace is genuine, or it’s like embracing your 2nd cousin that you have to see once a year during Thanksgiving and hope they don’t smell too bad, it’s something that is a marketable skill, either by choice or because a vendor is shoving it down your throat.  The Eclipse IDE ( http://www.eclipse.org ) and already knowing JavaScript has made this a painless endeavor to learn.
     
  • The History Channel’s Armaggedon week.  I can’t stop watching it!  All fingers seem to be pointing to 2012.  While a lot of this is sensationalist to be sure, it still is a scary thought.  My DVR is getting full recording all of it.

 

I look forward to 2009 being better than 2008, and I look forward to seeing daylight past 5:30p!  I miss drinking on the porch at East End grill after work.

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SAP Netweaver 7.01 – Session 2.1 (Configuration)

November 20th, 2008 Comments

The following steps are not supposed to make sense to beginners or even those who may have existing SAP developer experience.  The following are some basic configurations tweaks and hacks that you may want to apply to your new trial installation.  This is by no means a comprehensive (or coherent) list of all the tweaks, however from the perspective of building web application pages, may be a good primer for your sandbox installation.  These tweaks should not be considered best practice in an actual installation at your workplace!  (You probably don’t have access to do half of these functions anyway, unless you are a system administrator).  The trial version gives you SAPALL authorization to all the user ids, think of it as God Mode or something.

I will be breaking out these tweaks into smaller posts, and will add the posts as I remember other tweaks.  (e.g. Session 2.2, 2.3, etc).  This will be Session 2.1.  I will number the next session (Session 3) as a different topic such as Hello World app, or table creation, when I get to writing it.  For now, here are 2 tweaks/config steps.  The first which is easy, the second, which is… weird.

Import your profiles for modification
This allows you to edit Basis parameters as needed.

  1. Enter transacation RZ10
  2. Click Utilities -> Import profiles -> Of active servers.
  3. Click back

Hack the CX_FQDN class
This disables the system from caring what domain name your web applications were accessed from.  In other words, since the trial version installs on localhost, trying to share a link to a web app to your friend using your internet IP address does not necessarily fly.  If you have your own domain name mapped to your IP address, then maybe this is not necessary, but let’s just remove the check altogether.  (Do not do this in an actual workplace environment!)

  1. Go to transaction SE24 and enter CX_FQDN for Object type and click Display.
  2. Double-click on the CHECK method under the Methods tab.
  3. Click Method -> Enhance.
  4. Click Edit -> Enhancement Operations -> Show Implicit Enhancement Options
  5. Position your cursor on line 2 which should have a long line of ” marks.
  6. Click Edit -> Enhancement Operations -> Create Enhancement
  7. Click the Code button in the ‘Choose Enhancement Mode’ dialog box.
  8. You will be prompted to ‘Select or Create Enhancement Implementation’.  Click the Create Implementation button at the bottom.
  9. Enter Z_CHANGE_CX_FQDN as the name of the Enhancement Implementation.  (You can name it whatever you want, but it has to start with the letter ‘Z’).
  10. Give a meaningful name for this enhancement (e.g. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’, etc)
  11. For the ‘Composite Enhancement Implementation’, enter Z_CEI (or anything else you want that starts with a ‘Z’).  Then click the Checkmark.
  12. You will be prompted to ‘Create Object Directory Entry’.  Just click ‘Local Object’.
  13. Highlight your new Enhancement Implementation you just made in the dialog window and click the checkmark.
  14. You will notice in your editor window a section similar to below: 
    METHOD check.
""""""""""""""$"$\SE:(1) Class CX_FQDN, Method CHECK, Start       A
*$*$-Start:   9999-------------------$*$*

ENHANCEMENT 1 ZMIKE_ENHANCE.    "inactive version
*
ENDENHANCEMENT.
*$*$-End:   9999-------------------$*$*
...
  15. We will be adding one line of code (line 5).  Delete the * and type the word EXIT.  (Include the period).
  16. Click the activate button.  (7th button on the toolbar, looks like a flashlight/matchstick).
  17. Click the checkmark in the dialog pop-up you get.
  18. Have a beer.
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Linksys NAS200 Network Storage System

November 17th, 2008 Comments

I’m not one to write too technical of reviews of consumer products, as 100s of others can give a better review, but figured I’d throw in my experience with a purchase I made this weekend.  Go Google to get better information.

I made it out to Circuit City this weekend to see what I could plunder from a going out of business sale.  I ended up grabbing a NAS system from Linksys for 20% off.  I’d been eyeing it for a while since I’d seen it in action at a friend’s house.  It’s basically a network appliance with 2 SATA hard drive bays and 2 USB ports that provides LAN-wide access to the drives as sort of a central storage point.  This in itself is nothing new, as people for years have been using PCs as file servers for this very activity, etc.  At a price point after discount of around $100, I thought this was a good deal.  What the main selling point for me was that it has a media server integrated into it, which means it will stream my 500GB of videos directly to my PS3 which is hooked up to my television, all seamlessly and without worrying about if my PC is on, or if I will have to reboot etc.

Setup was easy enough, after my friend warning me that I would first have to offload my media from my 500GB drive because the NAS would want to format it.  After shuffling files around, I finally popped my now empty drive in and let the setup program format it, etc.  The admin functionality is web-based, similar to many other router admin pages, etc.  Copying the 500GB over proved frustrating, as I put a little too much trust into my wireless network not crapping out, which it of course did.  Several times.  After running a cable to my router and using my trusty wired connection, I was able to do the copy, which took several hours over 100mb connection.  A one-time pain that I’m willing to forget.

Since my primary use of this appliance was to hold my movies that are growing uncontrollably fast, I gave it a shot with interfacing with my PS3.  I was amazed how quickly the NAS communicated back to the PS3, a task which Vista seemed to be very slow and spotty on even being able to perform.  Playback had no studdering, and was able to seek forward and backward flawlessly.

I am very pleased with it media performance overall, and for $100-$150 depending on where you shop, this is a great value if you are looking into getting a storage appliance for the home.

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SAP Netweaver 7.01 – Session 1 (Installation)

November 16th, 2008 Comments

I thought about writing a few entries (or sessions, if you will) over the next few weeks about how to get a successful installation SAP Netweaver 7.01 on your own PC.  SAP has provided a trial version free of charge to anybody who has the guts to install it.

Why SAP?

SAP is more or less an Enterprise grade ERP platform that many large companies are using.  From a coder’s perspective, things of interest that I will begin posting about will be WebDynPro, ABAP, and BSP.  These are the core fundamental languages that can be used at a Web Presentation Layer.  People familiar with PHP and ASP will feel at home with BSP, as an example.

Most companies are obviously using SAP to perform business functions, however SAP’s free trial allows you to do whatever you want, whether it be writing your own CMS/Blog system, to writing an image host.  Possibilities are limited only by your own tenacity.  Unconventional things like these are what I will be doing and writing code samples for readers, so you do not have to be a subject matter expert of enterprise-specific functions, such as Material Management, Procurement, etc.  We will stick to simple tables, function modules, etc.  The application of one subject matter vs another does not change the underlying way you use the language.

System requirements require a little muscle, but still quite mild for today’s home PC standards.  The only requirement is to sign up to SDN (SAP Developer Network) which is also free, no strings attached.  The link provided below has the requirements and everything you need to get started:

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/80fd9a0a-e306-2a10-c896-b84c77c13ed2

After you have downloaded the installation image, installation is very straightforward on an XP machine.  I’d previously installed it on Vista, and after several failed attempts due to technical reasons of my OS having too many problems, I was able to get it to work.  I’d recommend XP, as I had no problem whatsover getting it on there.  I suggest following the quick-start guide included in the download to get the system and the SAP GUI installed.  The GUI is your window into the system and development IDE.

Next session will involve pointing out a few key transactions and server as a delta-training for what they would mean to a developer with an ASP/PHP background and how they correlate.

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Quantum of Solace

November 15th, 2008 Comments

Like probably everybody else, I went to go see the new James Bond flick. I like the new Bond much better than Pierce Brosnan, and this movie was good, but thought Casino Royale was better. I was really hoping to see a gimmick villian character since that seems to be a running theme, but was a bit disappointed to see just a generic unmemorable one. My friends need to learn that movies start earlier than 10:05p though. Yawn.

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Oh hey it’s the Internets.

November 15th, 2008 Comments

After a 3 or 4 years sort of just not caring about blogging anymore (who am I kidding, I still really don’t care), I figured I’d see what all the noise is about and maybe chronilize some more eventful happenings and worth mentioning going forward.  The last time I bothered trying to run a personal CMS-type system was probably even longer back, probably 5 or 6 years ago way before AJAX and “Web 2.0″ really existed.  I can say that throwing registering a domain name, it propogating accross name servers, and getting a web host was effortless.  I decided to go with BlueHost, and their file management system and all the other administration options they give me are much more impressive than in the past, complete with context menus where I could even unzip a .zip file I had uploaded of a theme.  Even my mom could do this.  Even YOUR MOM could do it, too.

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