Hackintosh upgrade from 10.7 to 10.8

There are plenty of excellent reviews of Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, so this post will focus on the steps taken to upgrade my fully working 10.7.4 system to 10.8. This is not intended as a complete install-from-nothing guide, requiring a working 10.7.x system to start with.

First some details on the hardware used. My Gigabyte P35-DS3R/Q6600 system was re-purposed at the start of 2012, and replaced with the following:

• Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 Motherboard
• Intel Core i5 2500k cpu
• 16Gb DDR3 Ram
• Nvidia 9800GT 1Gb video card from previous system
• 2Tb and 1.5Tb hard drives from previous system
•  DVD-RW  and BD-Rom from previous system

10.6.8 on Hackintosh

This post has been delayed a long time, partly due to the changes I made to my Hackintosh during the 10.6.8 update and partly due to Mac OS 10.7 Lion. Previous 10.6.x updates had been fairly straightforward, often needing nothing more than a change to the PMversion of SleepEnabler in com.apple.Boot.plist. That approach didn’t work with the 10.6.8 update. I tried using PMversion=23 but this resulted in a crash during boot for PMversion/kernel miss-match. A search of several hackintosh forums showed that this was working for some people, while others were using PMversion=0 to disable SleepEnabler.

10.6.6 on Hackintosh

Mac OS 10.6.6 has been out for a couple of days now, and I have successfully updated my main hackintosh to this release. The previous 10.6.5 release had required the addition of “pmVersion=21″ to the kernel flags section of my com.apple.Boot.plist file, but this latest update required no further modifications.

I haven’t found any problems with this release on my hardware. System updates always take a little longer on my hardware since I make a full bootable (and tested) backup before every major change, but that’s a good idea on Apple hardware as well since problems after updates are not unheard of.

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.

Lnx2Mac’s Realtek RTL81xx Driver

One of the problems I encountered with my original Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard based hackintosh was the network interface. The Realtek 8111B chip on the motherboard didn’t work very well with OSX’s drivers, and a workaround was required. With Snow Leopard I used a modified version of ifconfig and a script to get the network interface working correctly with bonjour, so the useful auto discovery features would work (iTunes, Finder etc.)

This worked well but wasn’t very elegant, so I was happy to discover Lnx2Mac’s port of the Realtek Linux RTL81xx driver. I disabled the ifconfig script and dropped Lnx2Mac’s driver into /Extra/Extensions, and after running a few terminal commands to set permissions/owners and rebuilt caches (see step 6 here) it’s working great.

Thanks to Lnx2Mac for the work that went into porting this driver, and if it helps you out you can make a donation from the project page.

The Hackinfireplace

I’ve been working on my latest hackintosh for a while now, with the last finishing touches taking much longer than anticipated. They’re all in place now so it’s time to reveal the hackinfireplace. That’s it in the video above, showing a couple of the HD videos that are launched using the function keys of a small wireless keyboard/trackpad. There’s a kitchen plinth heater hidden behind a removable piece of skirting under the display for those rare occasions when a bit of extra heating is needed.

The birth of this project was a visit to a DIY superstore as part of gutting and decorating the Lounge/Living Room. The choice of wall colours was easy, Oak floor agreed on and a new Leather Sofa and chairs a given. The choice of fireplace was more problematic. The existing fireplace was old, but not in a good antique way. Modern hang on the wall electric fires can look tacky with their fake flame effects, and the more expensive electric and gas wall mounted fires can get very costly. Most of those I saw with relatively easy fitting hung on the wall, protruding anywhere from four to six inches. They look fine from the front, but not so good from the side. What I really wanted was a fire flush with the wall, but that’s the point the cost starts rocketing. While in the DIY store myself and Mrs Basshead saw an LCD wall hung fire. A 19 inch screen played video’s of various fire’s, and there were also a few other scenes available. A remote control selected the video’s and also operated the 2kw heaters . A nice idea, but still wall hung not flush. The available video’s were also not great quality and the screen was not very high resolution.

Hackintosh Software Updates

It’s been a busy week for Snow Leopard updates, with the 10.6.3 V1.1 Combo Update closely followed by Security Update 2010-003. Both have been tested on three of my hackintosh machines, the original P35-DS3R hack, the Acer Aspire One hackbook and the as yet undocumented hackinfireplace. The only update that caused any issue was the last, requiring the AppleHDA.kext from 10.6.2 to be re-installed to get audio back. I had to do the same after the original 10.6.3 update so it wasn’t anything unexpected.

As usual backups of all three systems were made before installing updates. Where only one hard drive was available Disk Utility was used to resize the existing partition and add a new partition to the empty space, which then became the backup partition. It’s not as good as a separate hard drive but for a quick ‘just incase the update causes a problem’ backup it’s fine.