Unsupported Printers

Way back in 2002 I bought a HP Deskjet 6127 printer. I paid £200 for it, quite a lot at the time, as I wanted a good quality network connected inkjet printer. Move forward a few years to the release of the Mac OS 10.5 Leopard OS and the printer was no longer supported. HP had a statement in their support pages saying drivers were coming soon but they never arrived. With the recent arrival of 10.6 Snow Leopard the situation was looking even worse. I’m not adverse to buying new printers as I have a Canon ip4200 for disc and photo printing, but the HP’s built to last and sits on the network for any computers in Basshead Towers to use. HP were quoting a duty cycle of 5000 pages per month when I bought the printer, here’s it’s status display from the web interface.

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Security Update 2010-001 on Hackintosh

Apple this week released Security Update 2010-001 for Leopard and Snow Leopard Systems. The Update offers fixes for CoreAudio, CUPS, Flash Player, ImageIO, ImageRAW and OpenSSL and is a recommended update for all Leopard and Snow Leopard Users. I have now had a chance to install and test the update on my main Hackintosh and can report no found issues so far, so anyone using a similar method of installation should be fine to install through Software Update.

Over the past week I have done a re-install of Snow Leopard on my main Hackintosh, following some small irritations with permissions on the original install. As usual I made a backup to another hard drive then imported my user account and applications once Snow Leopard was patched to 10.6.2. This time round I have used a Boot132 CD and Chameleon 2 RC4, so over the next week I hope to update my original Snow Leopard on Hackintosh guide and create a new one to reflect the new method.

Mac OS 10.5.8 Released

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.

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.

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 – The Next Generation Part 2

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.

• The 10.5.5 combo update if you are installing from a 10.5 retail DVD
• OSX86Tools for easy driver and EFI string setup
• Chameleon DFE for Hard Disk from this post, link at Mediafire

Duplicate login items

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.

News for Monday 13th October

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.

Hackintosh/Leopard flash drive problems

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.

Leopard Finder ‘shared’ resources progress

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.