Ad Terras Per Aspera

Update: This article is out of date. Virtualbox officially supports OSX nearly flawlessly under 3.2: native EFI booting, USB keyboard/mouse, networking, and sound (using a third party driver). The only thing missing is 3D acceleration support.

Now that VirtualBox 3.1.4 is out, I decided to try OSX. I would like to thank this thread on the VBox forums for a few hints on how to do this.

I am doing this on a Core 2 Duo. This should work on any processor that has at least SSE3.

These instructions are for people who are used to using VirtualBox.

You need:

1. At least VirtualBox 3.1.4
2. A Hackintosh ISO. I used iDeneb 1.6 Lite, which is based on OSX Leopard 10.5.8. Others may or may not work depending if they include the appropriate hacks.

Make a new virtual machine, set:

1. Set it for FreeBSD
2. With at least 1GB of memory
3. And at least 10GB of HD space

Set the additional settings of:

1. System->Motherboard->Enable IO APIC to on
2. Do NOT enable EFI, it is not complete enough for OSX yet
3. System->Processor->Processor(s) matching what you actually have
4. System->Processor->Enable PAE/NX to on
5. Display->Video->128MB of video memory, with 3D Acceleration enabled
6. Storage->IDE Controller->Type set to ICH6
7. Network->Adapter 1->Attached to Bridged Adapter, advanced->Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (NOT MT Server or T Server)

Exit VirtualBox, edit the XML definition for the machine. For me, and I named my machine OSX, this was under ~/.VirtualBox/Machines/OSX/OSX.xml. Add the line…

<ExtraDataItem name="VBoxInternal2/SupportExtHwProfile" value="on"/>

… inside the <ExtraData> block, and save it and restart VirtualBox.

Mount the iDeneb ISO inside your virtual machine, and start it up. Remember to press enter to start the CD on boot.

Use the disk utility to format your drive to HSF journaled. Select that drive in the installer and hit the customize button before installing.

Select the following options in the iDeneb OSx86 Components menu:

1. Kernel->Qoopz
2. Essential Patches->ACPI Fix
3. Essential Patches->PS/2 Drivers->ApplePS2 Old
4. Drivers->Chipset->ICHx Fixed

Now, just install. This takes about 20 minutes.

To get network working after boot, go into the client’s menu while running and do Devices->Network Adapters, uncheck Cable connected, hit okay, go back in, and check Cable connected. After that OSX will connect to the network, and you have to do this every time you boot.

Sound cannot be fixed at the current time: VirtualBox’s AC97 emulation supports a version of ICH AC97 too old for the popular third party AppleAC97Audio.kext to support. Hopefully VirtualBox will get a HDA emulation, which will improve chances of being emulated correctly.

2D speed seems to be pretty fast without specific drivers, although some operations will be noticeably slow. I wish there was a specific video driver for this.

From the Fake Mothership…

This is followed by a recommendation that I retain an attorney to represent me. And then, I swear to friggin God, there’s a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they’ve got a pretty thorough list, which means they’ve been doing some research on this and the offer didn’t just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

You know what, Real Steve Jobs? Up yours. You should be so damned lucky to have someone like the Fake Steve Jobs (aka Daniel Lyons) to be the bizzaro version of you. Hell, if I was in the same position, I’d fucking hire him and put him on the payroll just to continue doing it.

And I fucking quote, “I have read a few of the Fake Steve Jobs things recently and I think they’re pretty funny.” You know who said that, Real Steve Jobs? You did!

Hey Daniel, if Steve does sue you, I’ll donate to your legal fund if you so decide to start one.

New HD: Well, I finally got around to replacing the hard drive the Powerbook came with… what once was a 60GB Hitachi is now a 120GB Samsung Spinpoint M. Samsung Spinpoints are the quietest, lowest power using, and coolest drives on the market in the 2.5″ market, and they perform similarly to other drives of the same class.

Enclosure: My old drive is now in an Icydock MB663UB 2.5″ enclosure, and through Newegg right now its $8.99 total until December 31st. The enclosure is basically a box of high grade aluminum, with no wiggle room inside (touches drive on all four sides), and is only a tiny bit longer than the drive itself. Although it has a built in 2 inch USB cable, it also comes with a two-headed several foot cable for non-mobile applications (or for drives that won’t spinup in under 500mA). Its the best HD enclosure I’ve ever owned, in my opinion.

Memory: I’ve upgraded the Powerbook’s memory from 1GB to 2GB, and I have to say, Leopard runs a lot smoother… not that it is noticeably slower than Tiger, but its like a new machine with more memory. Between the new HD and the more memory, booting takes about half the time (not that I often do that, sleep is damned useful). 2GB is the maximum on these Powerbooks, otherwise I would have gone for more.

VNC: Leopard 10.5.1 has “fixed” the VNC bug to an extent… connecting with x2vnc no longer makes AppleVNCServer crash, but it just makes it chew all available CPU time and barely work. This does not happen using an normal VNC user (less than 10% CPU time on average), but I expect x2vnc is doing something weird that it should be.

Smallest USB hub: Powerbooks only have 2 USB ports, and I have at least three devices I want to plug into it… so I bought a hub just for the Powerbook: a hub that happens to be smaller than 2 by 2 by 0.5 inches, Targus ACH63US Super Mini Hub. I mean, this thing is damned tiny… its so small, that you could throw it into your spaghetti nest behind your computer and not even know you have a hub. It may be a tad expensive, but I didn’t want yet another box hiding on my desk somewhere… instead, I have it tucked behind my printer (which already has too much stuff behind it). The hub also comes with a two headed cable like the Icydock did, but the heads are far enough apart that they can reach both USB plugs on my Powerbook (one is on one side, one is on the other, instead of both being on the same side… Powerbooks don’t have rear ports).

Oh ho ho! The hub arrived half dead (which soon became totally dead), and Targus is giving me shit over having the hub replaced under warranty.

I just found an interesting bug in how ColorSync, Apple’s color profile management framework, functions. This effects (but by far is not limited to) Safari, Finder/Cover Flow, and whatever sets the desktop background.

Any image that does not have a profile is not color managed. I mean, it is completely ignored: in my case, I profiled my Powerbook’s LCD using a Spyder2Pro colorimeter. Using the “2.2 gamma 6500k” profile generated by the Spyder2 software, the desktop background image “Purple Frond” that comes with OSX is actually displayed bluish in color because Apple did not embed profiling data in their background images.

I randomly came across the reason for this because I was editing a different background to fit my monitor differently than the automatic modes did. After saving in Photoshop (which was nice enough to include the sRGB color profile in the JPEG), the colors were different.. or rather, they were correct, matching what Photoshop displayed. Double checking against “Purple Frond” by opening it and saving it in Photoshop with the sRGB color profile makes it correctly display purple instead of blue on my desktop.

The correct behavior of ColorSync should be to assume the data is sRGB and color manage it as such, instead of just not color managing it at all. Many images found on the Internet are “broken” and do not have the proper color profile set, but are obviously sRGB data.

Update: The desktop background is set by Dock, apparently. Set your desktop background to “Change picture every… (time period)” with “Random order”, and run killall Dock in Terminal.app… Dock will automatically restart and change your desktop background.

So, I upgraded my Aluminum Powerbook to 10.5, and most likely this will be the last major version of OSX I use; 10.5 works with no G3s, nor the slower half of all G4s (with 867mhz being the cutoff), so the next logical step is to drop all G4s in 10.6, and all PowerPCs in 10.7 (though thats another 5 years away at least).

That said, the upgrade process went smoothly. Upgrading only took about an hour and a half, and only a few things broke. Three of the major ones are MacFUSE (which I use for SSHFS instead of OSX’s native Samba support), Synergy (which I use instead of X2VNC to remove control my Powerbook, because X2VNC still crashes OSX’s VNC server, even in Leopard, even though I’ve already reported this security bug to Apple and they have acknowledged it), and SideTrack (which I use to enable tap-to-click and drag-to-mousewheel-scroll on the trackpad).

MacFUSE can be fixed with a newly built version for Leopard, but neither Synergy2 nor SideTrack have been fixed (and I’m betting its from the same bug, the input subsystem in OSX has been changed a lot since 10.4).

I don’t care for the transparent menubar, as it makes it harder to read it when using dark backgrounds, such as 10.5′s nebula. The dock in horizontal mode looks kind of cheezy with the 3D look, but I use the dock in vertical mode so it doesn’t bother me. The ability for the dock to display the contents of folders is very useful, and I’ve been wanting that for awhile.

Spaces (ie, OSX virtual desktops) is also something I’ve been wanting for awhile because I use virtual desktops on Linux to organize my workflow in multiple tasks. I don’t have another hard drive to use with Time Machine, so I haven’t tested it yet, but it looks very nifty.

OSX 10.5 and all the stuff I usually have open all the time (such as Safari and X-Chat) seem to use less memory than before (and I was using Safari 3 Beta beforehand, so its not that). Boot and shutdown times seem to be the same (although hard testing by other people have proved 10.5 to be a tiny bit slower than 10.4, but not enough to care about).

All OSX apps use the same consistent look which has been irking me for awhile, and they’ve finally dropped the brushed metal look in exchange for just shaded grays. Since GMail now supports IMAP, I get to play with the new improved Mail.App, and it seems to be vastly improved since the last time I played with it.

Update: To use use IMAP on GMail, do not use the “automatically configure” option in Mail.app, uncheck that and select the IMAP account options manually.

Update 2: Without being able to archive mail, or single click delete all spam, or anything like that, Mail.app sucks. I’m going to stick with the GMail web UI.