10.6.5 on Hackintosh

Mac OS X 10.6.5 is out, and I have sucessfully installed the update on my main hackintosh with one minor change to my com.apple.Boot.plist. To recap, the important hardware in this hackintosh comprises:

• Gigabyte Ga-P35-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor
• 4Gb 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRam
• Nvidia GeForce 9800GT video card

The 10.6.5 update includes a new Kernel (Darwin 10.5.0) which doesn’t match the current custom SleepEnabler.kext, so will cause a kernel panic during startup. This is easily fixed, as SleepEnabler.kext can be passed an instruction through the com.apple.Boot.plist Kernel Flags section to set its declared version to match the kernel. Here’s my com.apple.Boot.plist from /Extra with the added instruction in red.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”&gt;
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=i386 pmVersion=21</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>5</string>
<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
<string>yes</string>
<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1920x1080x32</string>
</dict>
</plist>

It’s not a disaster if you install the update without changing the pmVersion, as you can enter it as a boot flag through Chameleon or whatever bootloader you are using. It’s still a very good idea to make a bootable backup before installing the update, and remembering to test it. There’s nothing worse than a backup that doesn’t work.

After installing the update I found none of my servers or other computers were appearing in the Finder sidebar, suggesting bonjour was not working. This seems to be because the 10.6.5 installer doesn’t take everything in /Extra into account when rebuilding caches, so either run pfix or the following commands in terminal (sudo su first)

chmod -R 755 /Extra/Extensions
chown -R root:wheel /Extra/Extensions
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions
chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions
kextcache -a i386 -m /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/Extensions.mkext /System/Library/Extensions /Extra/Extensions
kextcache -a i386 -m /Extra/Extensions.mkext /Extra/Extensions /System/Library/Extensions
chmod 755 /Extra/Extensions.mkext
chown root:wheel /Extra/Extensions.mkext
chmod 755 /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/Extensions.mkext
chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/Extensions.mkext