Comments (2)

By Matthieu, 2009-10-12 20:40

Update: For temperature/fan issues, this post over at HP Mini forums looks promising.

Yes, it’s another hackintosh post, but what can I say, it’s this stuff that’s hardest to remember and useful to lots of people. Emma, if you’re reading this, this was done for you. 🙂 Let me just say that this is purely for educational purposes, and yes, I do own a real mac and both Leopard and Snow Leopard.

1. Obtain the excellent iATKOS 7 DVD ISO. Burn to disc.
2. Boot from the install DVD. (You may have to use an external VGA monitor to prevent the “Blue screen”) Use the Disk Utility to format the drive as a single large HFSJ partition, using the MBR partition table. (I use a partition label without spaces because of some past experiences.)
3. Install; select appropriate drivers. Don’t reboot at the end of the installation.
   • None of the audio or video drivers work, so uncheck all of them.
   • VoodooPS2 with trackpad plugin works great
   • Intel ICH IDE driver?
   • Cardbus driver causes kernel panic, so UNCHECK that one
   • Voodoo kernel 9.5.0 is necessary, as this machine only has SSE2 (Intel Pentium M 715)
   • I selected the Broadcom wifi driver for a Dell 1370 MiniPCI card; my laptop originally came with an Atheros AR5005G. (The AR5005G works with Leopard, however last I checked it needed to use the old kext from Tiger, which breaks WPA support*)
4. Now comes the fun part. Download the GMA900 Leopard kext package. (source) Extract it and put the kexts on a FAT32 or FAT formatted USB drive.
5. Plug the USB drive into the Aspire. Reboot; at the chameleon boot menu press any key to bring up the boot flags prompt (at the bottom of the screen), then type -x -s -v to enter single-user, safe mode with verbose boot.
6. You will see a lot of scrolling text. Finally it will drop to a shell prompt with instructions about fsck and mount -uw. Do as it says.
7. cd to /Volumes. mkdir usbdrive.
8. mount -t msdos /dev/diskXsY /Volumes/usbdrive, where X and Y are the disk and partition numbers of your usb drive, respectively. This may require some trial-and-error, but getting the wrong one won’t harm your system in any way, it will just display an error message.
9. Once you have the drive mounted, cp -Rv /Volumes/usbdrive/*.kext /System/Library/Extensions. Then cd to /System/Library/Extensions and make sure the two new kexts are owned by root:wheel.
10. reboot. The system should now boot with QE+CI!
11. Once you’re at the desktop, you should now install the AC97Audio.pkg and (optionally) the fixed version of VoodooPS2Controller.kext that gives you back the ~ key. I also recommend the VoodooPower.kext from superhai to allow SpeedStep to work.

And that should be it! Note that I am writing this guide from memory, so I may have missed a few steps. DO NOT upgrade to Safari 4 on this machine, it causes kernel panics. Also, I have NOT tested the 10.5.8 update, so YMMV there.

*Atheros 5005G info: Install this IO80211Family.kext. Then, the Atheros card should be detected as AirPort. Unfortunately, attempting to connect to WPA-protected networks will result in a “connection failed” message. To get around this, you can either click the “assist me” button in network preferences and follow the prompts, or use the following command in Terminal (source):

sudo networksetup -setairportnetwork "your wifi name" "password"

Comments (2)

By Matthieu, 2009-10-10 16:33

Installed using iATKOS 7.

Patched files necessary:

Graphics (DSDT fix): ITX-220_DSDT_GMA950

Audio (VoodooHDA Volume fix): VoodooMOD

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2009-09-24 10:42

UPDATE: Google has posted a document explaining the service disruption. Google Service disruption – Sept 24/09

Gmail seems to be down right now… ( Sep 24, 2009 @ 10:42)

To monitor Gmail and other Google Apps services in the future: the Apps Status Dashboard

Comments (1)

By Matthieu, 2009-09-10 20:59

You’re not crazy. Google has done it again. They made a small change to the look of their website today: the font size and buttons on the home page and search result page are larger. I suppose this shows how ingrained Google is into everyday life, how even the smallest change is noticed by millions. Just like back in May’08 when they changed their favicon.

Internet users tend to dislike change for change’s sake. There is already a userscript that reverts Google to the “classic” look.  Another good example of user discontent is the launch of New Facebook, which incited much grumbling. Ultimately though, the whole thing blows over and the face of the Web is changed forever, old designs lost in the depths of the Wayback machine.

Comments (52)

By Matthieu, 2009-09-09 20:06

Mise à jour:  Ce clavier fonctionne toujours sous OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Il se trouve dans la catégorie “Autres” des méthodes de saisie.

Update: This keyboard layout still works with OS X 10.9 Mavericks. You can find it in the “Others” category of keyboard layouts. I have also put it on github.

This used to be on my googlepages page, but apparently that’s going to be shut down, so here it is now.

clavier-cf.zip

Download from Github (updated version with  and Ô thanks to joallard)

Download, unzip and stick the two files (cf.icns and cf.keylayout) in /Library/Keyboard Layouts. Then go to System Prefs, International (Language and Text for Snow users), Input Menu and check off “Canadien Francais 0.9”. (You may need to log out and back in before the new layout appears in System Preferences).

I did NOT make this keyboard layout, I found it somewhere on the web but the original site is now gone.

Voici le clavier Canadien francais pour Mac OS X. C’est l’équivalent du clavier “Canadian French” ou Français (Canada) sous Windows. Pour installer, télécharger le fichier .zip depuis github, décompresser, et copier les deux fichiers (cf.icns et cf.keylayout) dans le dossier /Library/Keyboard Layouts.

Here is the actual keyboard layout screenshot:

Comments (0)

By Matthieu, 2009-08-13 10:00

Now that Windows 7 RTM has been distributed to Microsoft Software Assurance customers, I have legally installed it on my work desktop. I used to run Windows Server 2003, so the Windows 7 eye candy and more desktop-oriented features are a nice change. However one thing I missed is the ability to have multiple RDP connections to my PC. Fortunately, ShadyMG over at Missing Remote has got it all figured out:

http://www.missingremote.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3692&Itemid=232

The linked file is mirrored here.

Update: It seems there is a more refined version of this patch, which also works to enable RDP server on the Home Premium version. http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/79427.aspx
File mirrored here: Concurrent_RDP_Win7_RTM_patcher_v1.1