Snow Leopard on Hackintosh Guide

Released on the 28th of August 2009, Snow Leopard is described by Apple as ‘Better.Faster.Easier.’ It’s a fairly accurate label, and once I got over my initial problem upgrading my Macbook the new operating system has been stable, fast, and a pleasure to use. The Family pack I bought from the Apple Store allows installation on five computers, so this covers my Macbook, original hackintosh, home cinema hackintosh (HTPC) and the Intel Atom server I recently built. I know the EULA doesn’t allow for installation on non Apple hardware, but I paid my £39 so I’m as legit as is currently possible.

Before I start listing the steps I took to get Snow leopard working on my original Hackintosh, it’s worth mentioning backups again. During the install I tried things that screwed up Snow Leopard and stopped it working correctly. Having a full backup meant it was easy to reinstall and restore user data. My recommendations for backup software are SuperDuper, which I bought a couple of years ago, or the excellent donation-ware Carbon Copy Cloner. If you intend to use Carbon Copy Cloner with Snow Leopard make sure you have the latest V3.3 beta 5, as I had major problems with version 3.2.1. Superduper version 2.6.1 is described as compatible with Snow Leopard, my testing has shown no problems so far.

Backups done, on with the install. I used a separate hard drive for my Snow Leopard install, and the first part is done from my existing 10.5.8 installation. There’s a great 10.6 Generic Retail Guide at Insanelymac that lists three methods of installing Snow Leopard on non Apple hardware:

1. Chameleon bootloader with a hidden EFI partition
2. Boot-132 Disc with a patched boot file
3. Chameleon v2 RC1 USB bootloader with Netkas PCEFIv10.1 patched boot

10.5.8 on Hackintosh

Snow Leopard is released today which means the focus of the hackintosh scene will quickly shift to the latest release. I picked up my Copy of the Snow Leopard Family Pack on the way home from work today and will by attempting a hackintosh install over the weekend, as a fresh install. My three hackintosh’s will be staying as they are until all the bugs are ironed out and Snow leopard is stable on non-Apple hardware.

My main Hackintosh, based on a Gigabyte P32-DS3R motherboard and Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 processor, is running 10.5.8. I had a problem with sleep not resuming after the install, but a quick search of Insanelymac.com showed a perfect fix by deleting disabler.kext and IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext from the Extensions folder. The same didn’t work with my newest Intel Atom server Hackintosh, in the limited time I have had over the past two weeks I haven’t found a fix yet. The HThackintosh hasn’t been attempted yet, as this and the server are not routinely web browsing or doing any other risky activity. Also, by the time the eighth point update to an Apple OS is released the urgency to upgrade is wearing off. These machines may stay at 10.5.7 until the Snow Leopard on Hackintosh guides are well tested.

As I always say, don’t forget to make a backup before upgrading any system, Apple or not, to Snow Leopard. My Macbook is currently being backed up to an external USB drive using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner, as soon as I have the option to restore to Leopard from a backup the newest big cat will be going on as an upgrade.

Hackintosh Atom server

In a previous post I told the sorry tale of my Synology DS106e network attached storage box. It served me well for 18 months until the fan stopped working and a scheduled backup led to the hard drive overheating. It was time to upgrade my server, and there were several options available.

1. Buy a replacement NAS box, either a newer Synology model or something similar from Qnap, Thecus, Netgear etc. This would cost anywhere from £70 for a used item on eBay to £300 for a top of the range home/soho device. The current Synology one drive budget NAS is around £180 online.
2. Buy a used Mac Mini from eBay. The newer Core 2 Duo/solo models fetch a high price but the original G4 versions at 1.25 or 1.4Ghz are selling for around £120. Ready made server in a small and silent box, easy to setup and expand through software.
3. Build a mini hackintosh based on an Intel Atom processor. This is perhaps the most flexible approach, is should be able to run Leopard and hopefully Snow Leopard. Linux and windows shouldn’t be a problem either, so it has plenty of options for software.

I decided to go for the third option, not really surprising since I have already built a Quad Core hackintosh and a Home Theatre hackintosh. Building something is usually more fun than buying a ready made device, although this depends on how well the end result works. With the decision made I started looking at the Insanelymac forums for details from people who had already used Atom processors.

10.5.7 and Display refresh rates

I’ve written previously about the setup of my HTPC and LCD TV, and this included setting the HThackintosh to the optimal resolution and refresh rate. Since then I’ve commented on the occasional small jumps in the picture, and after investigation I’ve put this down to differences in media frame rate and display refresh rate. Much HD content is 24 frames per second, which doesn’t go smoothly into 50 or 60 frame per second display refresh.

There are many threads in the Plex forums about using software such as DisplayConfigX to create custom display modes for refresh rate. There are also warnings that Plex has issues with display refresh rate and media frame rate being the same, resulting in audio sync loss. Auto switching display refresh rate to media frame rate is on the todo list for Plex, so hopefully the issues can be fixed.

HThackintosh Remote Part 1

After building my Home Theatre hackintosh I used a keysonic RF keyboard/trackpad (above) for control, with the intention of adding a smaller remote control at a later date. Apart from size the keyboard is a pretty perfect method of control, equally suited to media centre duties, web browsing and general computer use. It is a bit bulky for just watching media, so the search began for the perfect remote.

10.5.7 on Hackintosh

My main hackintosh is now updated to 10.5.7, using the 10.5.7 update dmg downloaded from the Apple web site. I could have used the Software Update install method which has worked just as well for the past couple of updates, but I have three machines to install on so it makes sense to download once. There appear to be no issues following the update, just the usual replacement of files that the update overwrites.

Mac Os 10.5.7 released

Apple has today released the latest update to its Mac OSX Leopard operating system. 10.5.7 offers the usual mix of bug fixes and security updates, and is available as an updater for 10.5.6 or a combo updater for any version of 10.5 Leopard.

Many components are updated in this release, including RAW image support, Nvidia graphic updates, Widgets, Finder network searches and printing. Knowledge base article HT3397 covers the update in greater depth. And for anyone wanting the last word in detail, Macworld has an article that lists just about everything updated.

My advice for anyone applying the update (hackintosh or macintosh) is make a backup before attempting. We all make regular backups though, don’t we? I’ve just had a 120Gb hard drive die that was fortunately used exlusively for playing games on Windows XP, but at just over three years old and light use it was certainly not an expected failure.

Hackintosh HTPC part 4

In Part 3 I briefly touched on screen settings, and ended up using the analog output of the HTPC at 1920×1080, 59.9Hz. Picture quality was good, and to my surprise the pixels output by the video card were perfectly mapped to the ones on the TV. I used the free monitor setup displays at http://tft.vanity.dk/ for testing, and applied setting for colour and sharpness that had been previously been set using a Home Theatre setup DVD.

The setting that made the biggest improvement here was sharpness. On my TV, a Samsung 46A656, the default setting was 50 on all inputs. I had assumed this meant no sharpening but a quick run through the test cards on the setup DVD showed this to be anything but neutral. A black pattern of lines on a grey background showed very bad white edges around the lines, indicating too much sharpening. Dropping the sharpening to 10 gave a much better image, and the colour setting was dropped to 42 from 50 using other tests.

Hackintosh HTPC part 3

In part 2 I detailed the motherboard, processor and ram picked for the HTPC. The plan was to initially use the spare Nvidia 7300GT card and replace this dependant on space available in the final case. I had a spare Tagan 480w PSU and a midi tower case as a temporary home, and the 500Gb hard drive from the hackintosh (replaced with a new 1Tb).

The build was straightforward so I won’t dwell on that. The first choice was how to install Leopard. The 500Gb hard drive had the hackintosh install on it so I chose to boot this first and see what happened. It wasn’t much of a surprise when this started up fine as it had previously been working on an intel chipset motherboard. The only thing that didn’t work was audio, so the next choice was do I keep the install and remove unnecessary software/files or do a fresh install?

Hackintosh HTPC part 2

Having decided to build a hackintosh HTPC in part 1, the next step is picking hardware. This would normally include a display and this project is no different. The display this time though is an LCD television instead of the usual LCD monitor.

I had a short list of potential TV’s and the top was occupied by a couple of Sony models, the 40V4000 and 40W4000. The decision on which to go for would depend on what deals were available as the spec is similar, with the 40W4000 being a 10 bit panel (instead of 8 bit) and adding some multimedia features. Next on the list were Samsung’s 6 series models. A local retailer had an older Samsung 46″ 5 series and a Sony 40L4000 (a cut down 40V4000) hooked up to a Vista PC through a KVM switch, running at something like 1366×768 resolution. I increased the resolution to 1920×1080 and to my surprise the Sony showed an unsupported display mode message while the Samsung looked fantastic.