OSx86

Well i got OSx 86 to boot on my laptop today. I used a development build of OSx 10.4.5 that had been patched with AMD support. My Laptop is a 2ghz laptop with a 60 gig harddrive, ATI Mobilty Radeon 9700 with an Intel 2200 bg wlan card. So far i have been able to get everything but the Wlan card to work. I Also have it setup to duel boot osx and windows xp. Here is how i did it.

First i installed windows XP sp2 on a 40 gig partition. This was just a normal install. Once the installation was complete i rebooted the computer, and booted of the OSx cd. When the setup starts go to utilities and disk manager. I took the remaining 20 gig and partitioned it as a Mac OS x journal-ed partition, then i continued with the installation.

Once the installation was complete i rebooted the computer, Now the darwin boot manager will load, if everything worked, and the planets were in alignment, you should see the Mac Os partition and the Windows partition. You will then be able to chose which OS to boot.

The First problem i had with the Osx install was the lack of video support for my Radeon Card. I Solved this by downloading Omnis Drivers (http://omni.starchaser.org). Once the drivers were downloaded i went through the installation procedure on his site. Ill outline it here:\\

1. Download the file to the Desktop (surely you know how to download, no?)
2. Safari will download and unzip the archive into Callisto_latest.
3. Start a new terminal window from Applications->Utilities
4. cd ~/Desktop
5. cd Callisto_latest or wherever the archive was decompressed.
6. vi CallistoHAL.kext/Contents/Info.plist
7. Replace my own PCI device ID with yours under the IOPCIMatch key (4150 is mine…)
   Don't tell me you don't know how to use vi? Try nano or Textedit then.
8. If your DFP monitor is detected as CRT by the driver, you can try to hard-code the EDID string of your monitor. Use the Monitor Asset Manager (or any other way) to retrieve your 128 byte HEX value string. When using MAM, you only need the actual hex values do not include line numbers (00:, 10:, 20:, etc).Next open the Callisto_latest folder on your desktop, then right mouse click on Callisto.kext and left click on Show Package Contents. Open the Contents folder and there you will see Info.plist.Double click on Info.plist file and it *should* open in Property List Editor. Click on the arrow next to the Root, then arrow next to the IOKitPersonalities, then next to the CallistoMatch.

   You will see a key called MONITOR_TYPE,EDID. Double click on it to edit it and replace the MONITOR_TYPE with DFP so it says DFP,EDID or with CRT,EDID for a CRT screen.

   In the value field of the same key replace the hex values there with the ones from your EDID, making sure that the < and > remain on the ends. You will see my original value there, it's the EDID for Apple Cinema Display 20" :). Once done, save the file with File/Save.

   Here's an imaginary EDID string, just so you see how it looks like:
   00 FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 10 AC 19 A0 4C 56 52 31 0D 10 01 03 80 2B 1B 78 EE EE 91 A3 54 4C 99 26 0F 50 54 A5 4B 00 81 80 71 4F 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 7C 2E 90 A0 60 1A 1E 40 30 20 36 00 B2 0E 11 00 00 1A 00 00 00 FF 00 48 46 37 33 30 36 33 52 31 52 56 4C 0A 00 00 00 FC 00 44 45 4C 4C 20 32 30 30 37 57 46 50 0A 00 00 00 FD 00 38 4C 1E 53 0E 00 0A 20 20 20 20 20 20 00 33

   It is absolutely important that you do not miss any characters in your EDID string, and that it is exactly 128 bytes long. Also have in mind that the above procedure is ONLY for non-Mobility owners, Mobility owners should not do this, your settings come from the BIOS.

9. sudo mv Callisto* /System/Library/Extensions/
   (enter your password when prompted)
10. sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/Callisto*
    (enter your password when prompted)
11. sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/Callisto*
    (enter your password when prompted)
12. We might need to clean up some of the display settings files, so proceed with the following inside the terminal window:
    • sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.window*
    • rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.window*
    • rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.pref*
13. Also remove any display settings in your com.apple.Boot.plis file, for example:
    <key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1280x1024x32</string>
    This file is in the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/ folder.
14. Before you reboot, make sure you remove the Extensions.mkext and Extensions.kextcache, so that system refreshes those and include Callisto:
    sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
15. Reboot and hope all goes well.

Once that was done, i had to mess with the ATIRadeon9700G.plugin file to get Quartz and OpenGL to work properly. These steps are outlined below.

Look in your /System/Library/Extensions folder for ATIRadeonXXXXGA.plugin/ (XXXX depends on your card model). Edit its Info.plist, under IOProviderClass key change IONDRVFramebuffer to CallistoFB, update or delete Extensions.mkext and Extensions.kextcache, then reboot.