Now for the hopefully last of the steps to a happy HTPC Mac. So far all has gone well and nothing terrible happened.
As I said in post 1 I got my first inspiration from here:
http://www.osnews.com/story/21564/Building_a_Hackintosh_Apple_Can_t_Sue_You_
Basically the interesting part being able to use the standard OS install. I pretty much followed the instructions on that page. But here I’ll also give some additional hints that might make your life a little easier.
So with a USB stick, a freshly burnt boot-132 CD and the Mac OS X Leopard DVD (10.5.0) I ventured to my new Atom powered sleek SilverStone Mac (or do I call it a PC?). Before I started though I had deleted all partitions off the hard drive so that the Mac OS X installer would not have any issues trying to delete Linux or Windows partitions. This I did with a Live boot CD running Ubuntu 9.04. The Partition Editor under the System menu did the trick.
That done I inserted the boot-132 disk and started the HTPC. As promised it came up with a prompt and after exchanging the DVD the new OS was happily installing. Note to partition the drive correctly before installing though.
The install took about an hour. Create your user & stuff and you’re ready to reboot. You will still need the boot-132 CD to start into your partition until you have installed the bootloader Chameleon.So reboot now and see what happens.
*TaDa*
You have your first OS X start! Probably you’ll only see a 1024×768 resolution but that’s 100% OK.First install the 10.5.7 combo installer from Apple. You might run into a system crash when you reboot. This is due to problems with hyperthreading (HT) on the Atom CPUs. This is probably due to the processor not being interpreted correctly but I did not yet figure a way of fixing that. Maybe someone out there has a clue. To get it running you therefore have to turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS.
Now start executing all those steps in the link above. You’ll need to install Chameleon, Kexts and the other goodies. One thing the documentation sort of misses is the fact that you manually have to set the Mac OS partition to be active if none of the tools has done that for you. Details for this can be read-up here.
Should you have more than one partition the boot manager will also come up every time to ask you where to boot from. If you don’t want that read up here how you can change on the boot loader. For me it were the entries…
<key>Kernel Flags</key> <string>rd=disk0s2</string> <key>Timeout</key> <string>4</string>
…in the com.apple.Boot.plist file.
One thing to note with the Intel D945GCLF2 board is, that the Realtek NIC is not fully 100% supported and the above description does not mention that. Get the Kext from here and install it with the OSx86 tool. All networking now works like a charm.
Finally repair disk permissions and install
If you have done all of the above you should be able to recreate this screen:
The important detail being…
If you do have the good fortune of having a SilverStone case with a display you will now need to get the display to work. the easiest way I found is by using the linked installer for LCDproc from here:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t83598.html
I also recommend Plex for the movie experience (or just stick to FrontRow for now). Perian is also a valuable asset to have for those video codecs. XSlimmer (see below) can also help with cutting down the space used by applications a bit.
The set-up has now been running a couple of days and I’m very happy. Two things remain to be done:
- I need to get 5.1 audio to work. So far no luck (or figure out a way for the on-board digital out to work)
- Find a way to activate the buttons and volume controller from the SilverStone case.
Although the latter is not that important to me. I’m content and am totally amazed at how well this has worked. The Atom is also a lot faster than I would have expected. It probably isn’t as fast as a Mac Mini but then I wouldn’t have expected that but it is a heck of a lot faster than my 1.42Ghz Mac Mini I had before (even with a 250GB 5400RPM drive upgrade!).
So the experiment was a success and I can now attack the final little nigglies.
Tags: Apple, Atom 330, Hackintosh, HTPC, Intel, SilverStone LC16-M, Ubuntu