Part 2: Where’d my IO go?

Shortly after upgrading my Hackintosh to 10.5.6 it occured to me that the machine was NOTABLY slower. Digging into it a little bit more I discovered it was all IO wait issues (read: poor disk performance). We’re talking like 5 minute boots and fun stuff like that.

I opened up System Profiler, and to my surprise there were no longer any SATA devices (T43 is a SATA based machine, at least mine is). The hard drive was now nested in the ATA section with the DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. At this point I suspected driver schnanigans so I then dumped dmesg to a text file and put it on a usb keychain for some comparisons.

Once again I imaged the machine and then restored the old 10.5.3 image and compared dmesg. The old 10.5.3 (which FLEW compared to my 10.5.6 image) was using AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext and the 10.5.6 image had switched to AppleVIAATA.kext. As I said in part 1, I had to select VIA-SB to even get OSX to install on this machine… so I guess this makes sense. I haven’t had time to boot the install DVD again to see if PIIXATA is an option to choose.

ANYWAY, I found this thread on InsanelyMac which includes the PIIXATA drivers for various OSX builds: AppleIntelPIIXATA kext fully working for all ICHx Mobo (All Sata Channels working), Fully working kext (Leopard & Tiger version 1.1)

I don’t think English is his first language, so let me try to clarify:

• Use OSX86Tools to install the AppleIntelPIIXATA.kext, don’t close the app yet.
• Open terminal and change directory to: /System/Library/Extensions
• mv AppleVIAATA.kext /var/tmp (in case you need it back!).
• Back in OSX86Tools check Set Extensions permissions & Clear Extensions Cache and then Run Selected Items.
• Reboot machine, and you should notice GREATLY improved performance.

If it doesn’t boot again, well don’t blame me 🙂

Till next time…

Part 1: Getting OSX 10.5.6 on my IBM T43 laptop

Over the next few posts I’m going to chronicle my struggles to get OSX 10.5.6 on my test laptop, this is just the first installment.

As I might have posted in the past, I do a bit of testing/development for OSX on a Hackintosh, more specifically using an IBM T43. I’m somewhat ashamed to say that, being that I’m an iPhone/iPod owner (and generally a fan of Apple products). I would love to own a real Apple branded machine, but they’re just not within my budget. Even used mini’s still seem to fetch near MSRP prices on eBay. So please, I really don’t need any lectures.

I started this journey with Kalyway 10.5.1 and over time used their comboupdates to get it to 10.5.3. I’ve been very content for a long time, but lately I needed to do some testing that required 10.5.6.

I imaged the laptop and unsuccessfully tried about 50 different methods to get it to 10.5.4, .5 and .6. Nothing really worked out for me 100%, so I decided to turn to the newer iDeneb releases.

First I acquired the iDeneb 1.4 (10.5.6) DVD ISO, and attempted to install. The DVD boots, installs about 3/4 the way and then dies with this error: pkgExtractor[162]: BomFileError 2: No such file or directory – ./usr/X11/share/doc/renderproto/renderproto.txt. I dicked with this thing for days and on about 7 different machines (not T43’s) and recieved the same results. Either I’m doing something TOTALLY wrong, or this ISO is bunk. I found a few other people who were having the same issues on the InsanelyMac forum, but no fix was ever posted.

Then I acquired the iDeneb 1.3 (10.5.5) DVD ISO, and likewise attempted to install … success! The winning combination to choose at install is:

• X11
• Patches 10.5.5 Ready -> Audio -> AppleAzailiaAudio
• Patches 10.5.5 Ready -> Chipset -> VIA-SB
• Patches 10.5.5 Ready -> Kernel -> Kernel 9.4.0 StageXNU
• Patches 10.5.5 Ready -> Network -> AppleBC5751 (more on this later)

If you’ve never installed OSX on this laptop before, make sure you disable SpeedStep in the BIOS or you’ll be hating life.

At this point you more/less have a working 10.5.5 machine, which is a step in the right direction. Still isn’t 10.5.6 though, so let’s continue on. You’ll notice your video isn’t quite right yet, and maybe some hardware you have isn’t working right either. My suggestion: get it to 10.5.6 and THEN worry about that stuff.

Lucky for us, iDeneb released a 10.5.6 upgrade kit. It can be found here: http://ideneb.net/en/homepage/63-ideneb-upgrade-kit-1056-rev1

Follow the instructions with it and voila, you’ll be at 10.5.6.

Now, to get all of my hardware devices hmmmmmmmmmmmm……….

Till next time…

Hackintosh Xquartz / X11 color depth issue(s)

I’ve been diving into OSX a bit more lately, and I’d like to share any tips/tricks I find along the way. I should go ahead and mention that I’m running Leopard on an IBM T43 laptop. That being said, many of the tips I might share are related more to the use of a Hackintosh. Consider this the first post of many stupid workarounds.

Don’t get me wrong… I’d love to own a new MacBook Pro, but I’m a poor man. These T43’s are suprisingly close to the older MacBooks and pretty much everything works on it.

Xquartz/X11:

As most of you might know, Apple started including X11 on the Tiger media and as a download before that. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe its installed by default in Leopard. Either way I was having some issues getting it started on this ThinkPad. In /var/log/system.log I noticed this error:

Feb 20 00:52:13 FakeMac org.x.X11[438]: Fatal server error:
Feb 20 00:52:13 FakeMac org.x.X11[438]: Unsupported color depth -1

This T43 has an ATI Radeon X300, which is nativly supported by Leopard, but the Xserver can’t query the depth from the driver. I find it hard to believe that many other people arent running into this too. You could install the MacPorts X11, but even they reccomend using the native Xquartz.

Now this is in the man page for startx, but most Mac users are terrified of the CLI for whatever reason.

The Fix: Open Terminal -> defaults write org.x.X11 depth 24

This hard sets the color depth and viola X11 will now work. If you’re not scared, go ahead and man startx in Terminal and see all the other fun stuff you can do.

I really needed this to work so I could use the Gimp for OSX and MegaTunix to tune the MegaSquirt in my car 🙂

Till next time…