Tim Sodhi’s Weblog

Hi all, by popular demand – here are the contents of my /Extra folder, including the working DSDT.aml and the extensions (kexts) therein. These work superb on my 965P-DS4 system, and should work for those with the DS3 motherboards as well. Let me know how it goes!

http://www.mediafire.com/?4nxvnbn21lf

As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to relegate my main machine (Gigabyte 965P – DS4) to a file server. I decided to go the no-hassles route and installed Windows 7. After painstakingly converting all my drives back to NTFS, I found to my chagrin, the great amount of lag when opening a network share via Samba (SMB) on my Macs. The Finder would scan the remote directory for what seemed like minutes before it showed me the contents of the folders.

That in addition to the messed up permissions on the server machine made it nearly impossible to sync files to and from the iMac/Mac Mini/MacBook Pro. Each time I’d initiate a transfer/sync session, the permissions on the Windows server would cause the sync client to erroneously recognize the entire data set as new, and cause a full copy between machines. Not too serious, but it does get old when the entire network is choked up due to 100GB of data crossing over each night.

And this is when I decided to head back to Mac for my server needs. It is an old adage that if you don’t flex your muscles enough, you lose them. Apparently, the same goes for Hackintosh skills! For the life of me, I couldn’t remember which set of KEXTs I used in my /E/E folder, so I decided to go back to the easier Leopard route. I installed iPC, only to notice the slower network speeds of 32MBps (Gigabit Ethernet). I could get up to 60-70MBps on Snow Leopard – so indeed, I decided to reconvert all my drives to HFS and then start the process of installing Snow Leopard.

I had to refer back to my blog and to the relevant websites to pick up pointers. Luckily I had my DSDT handy and after a couple of trial and errors, I finally had Snow Kitty back up on my Hack. I used Chameleon RC4, and with no need for manual UUID injection, things just worked the way they should. I added a number of flags to my com.apple.boot.plist – mainly to cause a timeout at the boot selection screen, as well as to hide some extra drives that showed up. I also have a new set of KEXTs I am using. These are:-

fakesmc.kext (new one)
LegacyAppleYukon2.kext
LegacyHDA.kext
NullCPUPowerManagement.kext
OpenHaltRestart.kext

It has been a few weeks since then. I am running a 32Bit Kernel and Extensions, and I couldn’t be happier. Chronosync keeps all my Macs up-to-date and runs scheduled backups of all my home movies and iPhoto data.

So I am back from an extended road-trip with former colleagues from the Netherlands. It was an enjoyable trip that took us 1300 miles from home to Catskill, New York, and Washington DC, and back again, with stops here and there. I am headed back to work after a long break, and I must admit I did miss using my brain cells the past week.

In the interim, the world has been busy releasing new apps/functionality and updates. The biggest of course being Chameleon 2 RC3. It is out, and for the selected few, it works great. It no longer errs on large drives and has full Snow Leopard support. One advantage of using it over Netkas’ 10.1 EFI is that it weeds out non-boot drives from the startup menu. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the best of luck with this version of Chameleon. It seems to oddly enough not work with my Graphics Card. As I wrote in an earlier post, I use EFI strings in my com.apple.Boot.plist for my Graphics card. The same however, does not work with Chameleon RC3. QE/CI seems to chug along just fine, but the resolution is stuck at VESA 1024×768. I refuse to use boot flags to force a resolution, and I am unable to get to the root of the issue. In the meantime, I have started using a DSDT.aml fix for my Graphics card. As a result, I now have full audio (in/out), QE/CI for my GFX card, and Gigabit LAN using my DSDT.aml. Life is indeed good.

Huzzah – Logitech is out with drivers for Snow Leopard (both 32 and 64 bit) and they work really well. Finally I can use my MX Revolution and VX Nano mice with Snow Leopard without additional hacks.

With new beta releases of DropBox, MenuMeters, Growl and the like, the migration to Snow Leopard can finally be proclaimed – a done deal.