Apple has released Mac OS 10.5.8, the eighth update to it’s Leopard operating system. Offering the usual combination of security and bug fixes, full details are available in knowledge base article ht3606. I’m currently working through my three hackintosh systems to see if there are any problems with the upgrade, so a full report will follow.
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.
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. Read more…
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? Read more…
Part 1 of this article detailed the hardware used for the install, so I’m now going to detail the steps involved in installing using the Boot132 method. There are some software packages that are useful to have ready to go on a flash drive to ensure they are accessible if your network is not working after a vanilla install.
After completing a fresh 10.5.5 install on my hackintosh (part 2 coming soon) I had a poke around the system preferences to find anything that wasn’t working as expected. One thing that surprised me was the login items section of my user account. The screenshot below shows part of the massive list of login items.
VideoLAN updated to 0.9.4
The cross-platform free and open source video player is updated. Versions available for a wide range of operating systems.
The story behind Cydia on the iPhone
A brief article on the iPhone and iPod’s main jailbroken software installer.
Running Leopard on a Netbook
Nice article about installing Leopard on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook.
First T-Mobile G1 user review
Lots of questions answered and a mixed bag of pro’s and con’s.
Smartphone showdown: BlackBerry Storm vs. iPhone
Macworld does the head to head that everyone wants to see.
ASUS plans touchscreen, dual-core Eee PCs
Wondering what’s next for the Eee PC? read the article for the details.
I’m not sure quite where the cause of this problems lies, but I’m experiencing problems with USB flash drives on my hackintosh. I’ve had a Kingston 4Gb stick for a while now that works fine under Windows and has worked fine on Leopard. The last time the device was used with the hackintosh was around three months ago so it’s not clear when the problem started. Every time I try to copy files to the drive the transfer speed is worse than USB 1 spec, and the estimated time to completion when moving 200Mb earlier today was over an hour.
The reason for using the drive again was that two 8Gb flash sticks arrived today and I was thinking of doing some comparisons with Leopard running from Hard Drive and Flash Memory. The Kingston drive went in for some speed tests which turned out to be pointless since both old and new flash memory was appallingly slow. Trying to speed test the new flash drives (Dane-Elec brand) even froze Leopard a couple of times.
A search of several sites turned up many users suffering the same problem under Leopard, and these people are running genuine Apple hardware. I’ve had intermittent problems in the past with things like password prompting when waking from sleep, and it’s difficult to discern if the problem is because I’m running unsupported hardware or a Leopard issue. With many people reporting transfer speed problems after upgrading from 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard I’m leaning toward Leopard being the problem, so more searching is needed.
UPDATE I tried the same flash drives on my Macbook and got similar results, transfers were no higher than USB 1 speeds. Next test was a Panasonic Lumix camera connected by USB cable, speeds were also USB 1. The surprise was a Kingston 1Gb SD card in an Integral SDHC USB card reader which was transfering at the speeds I would expect, looked around 7Mb/s. Finder reported 900Mb would take less than a minute to copy.
A 60Gb 2.5inch SATA drive in a USB case was also tested and worked very fast, with finder copying 185Mb to the drive in just a few seconds and showing that 2.58Gb would be copied from the drive in under a minute. Looks like the problem is confined to USB flash drives.
I’ve written several times in the past about the lack of network shares showing up in the Finder sidebar. The issue has been around since I first built my hackintosh using 10.5.2. Nothing would show up, other Macs or Windows (SMB) shares. I’ve tried many suggestions with no luck until this morning. My motherboard, a Gigabyte P35-DS3R using the Realtek 8111B chip. Read more…
Following on from its Opencomputer and OpenProcomputer models, Psystar has now released the Openserv 1100 and 2400 models. The 1100 offers four drive bays in a 1U rack space case and is available with a range of operating systems including Mac OSX 10.5 server. The 2400 models ups the drivebays to six in a 2U case. There’s been no reported action from Apple following the release of the Opencomputer, so it looks like Psystar are confident they can continue with their Mac OS range with impunity.
There’s also an Opengamer range on offer, but not surprisingly this is restricted to Windows Vista.
Also on the Psystar web site is a 10.5.3 installer for the Opencomputer range. This downloads and installs the 10.5.3 update from Apple for the hardware that the Opencomputer could be configured with. There’s no indication if this would work for a homebrew hackintosh with the same hardware.
Latest development in the OSX86 world is the EFiX usb dongle to allow any compatible PC to boot a genuine unpatched OSX install disk. Netkas has a video on his site of the sample he received which gives this some credibility, but trying to access anything other than the home page at efi-x.com results in a 404 page not found error.
There’s no more information available, so how much post install patching for harware compatibility will be required is not clear. The device is due for release on the 23rd of June so more details should be revealed soon.
