You’ve picked your Kalyway or iATKOS OSX86 distribution, made all the preparations, so now it’s time to actually install it!

As a side note; as with my other OSX86 posts this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive walk-through. Instead I want to explain some of the things I learned and let you know more about the process. This way you’ll be in a better position to make the right choices yourself as you learn what’s actually happening.

This post is written from the point of view of using Kalyway, but if you’ve chosen iATKOS then don’t worry. The differences are minor and easy to figure out.

Warning!

Unless you’re very lucky it will take several install attempts to get a working system. I strongly recommend you try one package at a time until you find what works. E.g find the working CPU packages before you start selecting Video/network packages. Also be sure to keep track of which packages you have tried.

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Gizmodo have a post up featuring a video showcasing the bootup procedure of the Psystar Mac Clone (For a lot less than the cost of a Mac, Psystar will sell you a better spec PC running a modified version of OSX). This is definitely running one of the OSX86 distributions, but I’m not sure which. The “About this Computer..” window doesn’t show the iATKOS logo but then that could easily have been removed.

Interestingly Gizmodo say the Apple Software updater doesn’t appear to work, which in my experience is not the case with either iATKOS or Kalyway. Both of these can download updates just fine (though be careful about installing updates if your machine can’t run the vanilla kernel).

I wonder if this is intentional to stop a user accidentally breaking their install by installing Apple updates, or it’s just a badly performed install. I suspect the latter.

On a different note I really really dislike how as of late certain companies and individuals are taking the hard work by communities and packaging them as a commercial product for their own gain. Before Psystar  in the Apple Ecosystem there was IPhone Sim Free, and only today I noticed some schmuck at ATV4Windows charging for prebuilt PatchSticks that allow you to run custom applications on Apple TV. ($50 for a $5 USB stick, five minutes work, and access to a website with information ripped from free forums? Umm no thanks).

If you really do want to unlock your iPhone, or install OSX86, or patch your AppleTV, then I recommend you make the effort to learn how yourself. I promise you it’s really not that hard, and if a future update wipes out your work you’ll know how either to fix it, or find out how. Paying for these things will sooner or later lead to an expensive paperweight.

Lately I’ve noticed more people using Twitter, and not just those in technology circles. Since I’m not one who likes to be left behind, I thought I’d give it a blast for a few weeks and see how it goes.

Of course these things are only fun if they include people you know, so here I am; Follow me! http://twitter.com/agrant

(The best part may actually be the Twinkle client for iPhone which can not only tags your messages with a location and picture, but also show you tweets from everyone near your location. I’ve already discovered plenty of people to avoid in the area around my office).

Perfect!

So you’ve picked your OSX86 package of choice and you’re about to try and get it running on your PC. This post will cover some the preparations and things to be aware of before attempting an install. Not only will they make life simpler, but they’ll help you understand what’s going on and how to deal with any problems.

(I’m going to assume that you’ve decided to use Kalyway but if you’re using iATKOS don’t fret, these still apply and I’ll cover any differences).

Your OSX86 emergency kit.

It’s best to assume that something is going to go wrong, and when it does these items will help you recover from it. These are vital if you’re trying to install OSX on a separate partition for a dual boot system.

• A backup of anything you care about on your machine. Accidents can happen..
• A boot disc that allows you to change the boot partition on your harddrive (I recommend the GParted Live CD)
• A way to repair the boot record of your existing OS. (E.g. the Vista install DVD).

Your OSX86 wishlist Kit

While not strictly necessary, these items can make the install process a whole lot easier and less time consuming. The first will certainly make things a lot easier if you encounter problems, particularly if you can’t boot back into your other OS or get your network adapter working.

• Access to the Internet by some other mean than the computer your installing.
• A spare external/internal drive or partition drive with around 10GB or so free space. When you have the basic install working you can then clone it before adding drivers/10.5.2 etc incase anything goes wrong.
• A good book/magazine to read.
• a kext file for your network adapter on a thumbdrive or similar (see below).

Partitions

To install OSX you need a separate partition of at least 5GB. It can be empty/full and formatted to whatever filesystem you like. During install your first step will be to use DiskUtility to format it to “HFS+ Journaled”, the Mac filesystem.

The partition must be a primary partition, you cannot use an extended partition. As a refresher; You may only have four primary partitions on a hard disk. If you wish to have more than four the others must be logical partitions located within a primary-extended partition.

If you need to create an empty partition (or resize an existing one) I highly recommend using the GParted Live CD. Burn the CD, reboot, and it will boot into a Linux shell that allows you to move/resize/create/delete partitions. Two notes;

• If you are using Vista and move your Windows partition then you may have to use your Vista install DVD to repair it afterwards.
• If you encounter a graphics related error when booting GParted, just select the “Vesa” option from the startup menu.

If you’re like me you’re probably planning to install OSX on a small partition and resize it later if you decide to stick with it. This is a mistake.

Moving/Resizing HFS+ partitions is a fucking pain you really want to avoid. Try googling on the subject and you’ll see what I mean. While you cannot easily move/resize HFS+ partitions, it’s easy to merge one with an adjacent partition to increase the size. For this reason, if you’re going to start with a small partition for OSX be sure that after this partition there is enough free space (or partitions that can be erased/shrunk) that can be merged into it. Don’t create a small partition at the end of your drive. The chances are you’ll have to reinstall at a later date.

Kernels

The kernel is the heart of an operating system, on OSX the kernel is named “Mach”. When it comes to OSX86 you have two choices; The vanilla/stock kernel that is provided by Apple, or a patched/hacked kernel.

Actually you don’t really have a choice. If you are using a Core Duo (or Core 2 Duo) CPU, and a motherboard that is either Intel manufactured or uses an Intel chipset, then there’s a chance you may be able to use the vanilla kernel. If not you will have to use a patched kernel that has support for other processors. Patched kernels are necessary to solve problems with hardware that is different from that used in regular Macs.

(As a side note a Pentium D is not a Core Duo. They’re both Intel chips, both contain multiple Cores, and both use SSE3. But you will still need a patched kernel for a Pentium D).

With the 10.5.1 Kalyway disc you can check before installing whether your system will work with the vanilla kernel. After booting from the install DVD at the prompt type “kernel” (no quotes) and your machine will attempt to boot using the vanilla kernel. If this fails (hangs, or goes into a reboot loop) you’ll have to join those of us with patched kernels.

If you are using iATKOS then unfortunately the only way to tell is by performing an install using the vanilla kernel and seeing what happens!

You should also find out beforehand whether your CPU has support for SSE3. SSE3 is a set of CPU instructions found on more recent Intel processors and is used by parts of OSX, particularly for Rosetta (the PowerPC emulator). You can use Everest 2.2 to check your processor. If it doesn’t support SSE3 you’ll need to select an SSE2 patch during install.

Hardware

Aside from ATI/Nvidia cards, both Kalyway and iATKOS come with a limited set of drivers in their install packages. Unless you’re very lucky you will almost certainly have to track down and install the correct kext (Kernel Extension, a Mac term for a driver) files afterwards.

To do this it’s important to know exactly what hardware you have in your PC. Often the name displayed is somewhat generic, for example my network Adapter was displayed as a “Broadcom 57XX”, so you must find out the exact device ID. To do this you must open up Device Manager, view the Properties for the device, select the “Details” tab and select Device Instance Id from the list.

In the above example you can see the Vendor ID is 10EC, with the Device ID being 8029. For each piece of hardware you should record these details along with the displayed name. It’s a lot easier to get this information within Windows than it is to find it later on.

The most important piece of hardware is going to be your network adapter so try and find the correct kext file ahead of time. When you get your network adapter working you can hunt the others down from within OSX. (for the device above you would try googling “osx86 kext 8029″). The insanelymac OSX86 forums are a great source of information, but be prepared to do some searching.

Although I managed to get by Broadcom 57XX adapter (device ID 1677) and Sigmatel Audio card (9210) working with very little trouble some people aren’t so lucky. The good news is that you can get a cheap USB network adapter for about $20 that’s supported without the need for additional drivers. The bad news is that for other hardware such workarounds becomes progressively harder.

Summary

Successfully installing OSX86 on your PC can range from trivial to extremely difficult, most of which will depend upon the hardware in your computer and how you approach the install process. The information above should give you some tips for preparation and clarify a few things you might not be aware of.

Next up I’ll cover the basic steps to take during installation and explain a few terms such as Guid/MBR/EFI and how they may (or may not) apply to you.

(Or, How to sync an iPhone with one computer and manually manage music and videos on another).

Because I do most of my music listening at work and my Calendar/Address book are kept in Outlook I have my iPhone setup to sync with my office PC.  When I’m at home however I find I also want to put music/podcasts/videos on my iPhone for the weekend or trips.

Normally it’s only possible to sync an iPhone with one computer. If you try to use a second computer you get the warning below that "the iPhone XXX is synced with another iTunes library. Do you want to erase this iPhone and sync with this iTunes library"?

However, I’ve found an easy fix for this. In the instructions below I’ll show how to modify any iTunes Library so it can also be synced with your iPhone. You can then either manually manage your iPhone on a second computer, or sync different data on different machines (E.g. Music at home, Contacts/Calendar at work).

The instructions below use the example of modifying the iTunes library on my home Mac to work with my existing iPhone/PC setup. If your existing library is on a Mac, or both machines are of the same type, then the steps are identical.

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I’ve had Mac OS X 10.5 running my my PC for about a week and getting everything set up has been quite the learning experience. I now know more about kernels, boot schemes, and partitions than I ever thought I would.

Although everything is running smoothly it took me multiple installs (10+, easily) to get to this point. Partly this was due to exploring the different patched releases, and partly because of later either breaking (or thinking I’d broken) the install while installing drivers or Apple updates.

Although I managed to find answers to the questions I had and solve all the problems I encountered, doing so was a tedious process that involved searching both Google and enthusiast message boards. While there are a lot of “how to install” topics, the answers or hints to most of the problems I encountered were buried mid-way through a 32-page followup of of comments and discussion.

In the hope of making this information a little easier to find, and to cement things in my own mind, I’m going to write a series of posts that detail most of the answers and solutions I found. I’ll also include some tips that should save time for people who want to experiment with OSX on their PC.

First up we’ll start by looking at the differences between the two main packages for installing OSX on your PC - iATKOS and Kalyway.

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This week I tried installing Mac OSX 10.5 on my PC (more on this later) so I could have a play with the iPhone SDK. I’m a little underwhelmed by some of the restrictions, but there’s still a couple of ideas I’d like to prototype and see what becomes of them.

As my plan was to dual boot Vista/OSX I used GParted to shrink my main partition and create a little 20GB one for OSX. Then during the OSX install I selected this partition and formatted it with the Mac’s HFS+ filesystem.

At least that was the plan.

Somehow (and I blame the cat for distracting me) I managed to format both partitions and as a result blitzed my main Vista install. Document, settings, music, Whiist, (and most critically of all, my Counterstrike config file) all gone in the blink of an eye*. Yikes!

So, for the first time ever I found myself breaking out the Windows Home Server restore CD, placing it in my PC and rebooting with crossed fingers. And it worked, flawlessly and amazingly well. I clicked through the wizard, selected the backup from the night before, and a few hours later my PC was back in the same condition prior to my little faux pas.

Having been a Windows Home Server user since the early betas I’m well aware of its features and functions, but this is the first time I’ve ever needed it to save my bacon and it passed with flying colors. 

* Ok, I confess. I have multiple backups of these that should handle most combinations of disaster. Some of them lag by a week or so though and reinstalling and restoring everything would have been extremely tedious. And my Counterstrike file with my lovingly crafted bindings really would have been gone forever!

I’ve been using the Vista version of Windows Media Center for a little over a month now. Initially I was underwhelmed, but after a lot of tinkering, some media reorganization, and a small hardware purchase I feel everything is finally working as well as MCE2005 did.

From comments and emails it seems I’m not the only one who has teething problems. In this post I’ll list a few of the tweaks I made that improved the performance of Media Center in Vista, and the $40 hardware change that made a huge difference.

Power Settings

By default Vista’s power management is set to “balanced”, and in balanced mode the minimum/maximum processor states are set to 5%/100% respectively. This means during periods of inactivity or low utilization your CPU performance to 5% of the norm. This can seem like a good thing, particularly for a HTPC where heat/noise is a concern, but it can also cause problems. If sudden activity requires more CPU time (e.g bringing up the guide or a menu while watching TV) then there can be a noticeable lag while the processor attempts to ramp back up.

Depending on your processor I’d recommend you switch to the High Performance plan, or change these settings from anywhere between 50%/100% to 100%/100%.

This option can be found in Control Panel->Power Options->Change Plan Settings->Change Advanced Settings.

Indexing

By default Vista will index files stored on your hard-drive for fast searching. Normally this is a good thing, but for a HTPC it’s overkill. You can disable indexing on a per-drive basis. At the very least you should disable indexing for the drive or partition where your recorded TV is stored (keeping recorded TV on a separate drive/partition is a performance tip in itself

Computer->Right Click Drive->Properties->Index this drive for faster searching.

Aero

Aero is the name of the fancy new UI effects in Vista, which are partly the responsibility of a component called the Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe). I’m not entirely sure why, but with Aero enabled I found dwm.exe would be taking ~5% of CPU time, even with Media Center set at fullscreen. Disabling Aero by choosing “Vista Basic” as the color scheme disables DWM and removes this problem.

This option can be found in Control Panel->Personalization->Window Color and Appearance.

NAS (Network Attached Storage)

With MCE2005 I kept all of my media (Music, Pictures, Videos) on my Windows Home Server box which was connected by a Wireless-G network. Aside from the occasional stutter in a film this worked perfectly. Everything was also kept in a backed-up location accessible by all machines.

With Vista MCE this did not work well at all, with videos being particularly problamatic. When viewing a folder of videos Media Center will attempt to create thumbnails but does this in a decidedly synchronous manner - the interface stalls while each thumbnail is created. When you have a folder of 20+ videos on a network drive you can pretty much forget having a usable interface for a good few minutes.

It’s been said Media Center is not designed to access networked media in this manner although I contend that is an implementation flaw. Creation of thumbnails or meta data should happen in the background and be invisible to the user, whether it takes two seconds or twenty.

Because I didn’t have enough space on my Media Center machine to store videos I plugged in a 500GB external HDD and setup a nightly synctoy task to keep the media files updated with my Windows Home Server. An alternative would be to turn off thumbnails, or network your machines using gigabit Ethernet (sadly the latter is not an option for me).

Video card / MPEG decoder

Vista Media Center now comes with a built-in MPEG-2 decoder allowing you to watch TV out of the box without the need to purchase a 3rd party solution. This isn’t entirely an altruistic move by Microsoft. Providing their own MPEG-2 decoder ensures an end-to-end protected media path for DRM reasons. By default Vista Media Center will not even allow the use of 3rd party decoders such as PureVideo, although they are ways to force this.

Vista’s video rendering supports DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration), so if your graphics card supports DXVA and has the correct drivers you’ll benefit from hardware accelerated MPEG-2 decoding. Unfortunately, as of now most graphics cards don’t support this.

Under MCE 2005 all of my SDTV/HDTV decoding was handled in hardware by my Geforce 7800 and the NVidia PureVideo decoder. Under Vista, the PureVideo decoder was no longer supported and without DXVA support all decoding was performed in software. When viewing HDTV this put so much strain on my CPU that the UI would often become unresponsive.

I then tried to switch back to PureVideo (as mentioned there is a method to force Vista Media Center to use 3rd party decoders), after which hardware acceleration was again working. Unfortunately if Vista detects the broadcast-flag it will not allow playback via unsecured decoders, so to view premium channels such as HBO you must use the Microsoft decoder.

Fortunately ATI’s range of Radeon HD cards that support DXVA and HDCP under Vista are relatively cheap. The performance of the lower end HD cards for gaming may be questionable, but for decoding MPEG-2/4 they’re excellent and if you’re running an HTPC there’s really no need to buy a more expensive card. I picked up the Gigabyte Radeon HD2400XT for a shade under $50 which had the added benefit of being fanless. After installing it I was back to being able to watch all SDTV/HDTV channels with almost zero CPU usage.

Summary

I found the four tweaks above accounted for about 95% of the performance issues I was experiencing after upgrading to Vista. Depending on your system hopefully some of them will be of use to you.

Aside from the above tips there are also a number of guides on the Internet worth checking out about how to disable unwanted startup programs or services. In addition I have a nightly task scheduled that both defrags and reboots my system. I have no empirical evidence, but it seems to help everything stay nice and fast.

I’ve been using my V2 Linksys Media Center extender for a few weeks now and thought I’d post some thoughts on the experience.

• The form factor is great. It’s very small and utterly silent.
• Linksys include a set of each cables (aside from HDMI) which is nice.
• The included remote feels much cheaper than those included with V1 extenders.
• Setup was super-easy and the non-extender setup pages are well implemented.
• Startup times are abysmal. It takes around 60 seconds over Ethernet and longer via Wireless-N. Powering down also takes a surprisingly long time.
• Video quality is excellent for both SDTV/HDTV, as well as XviD.
• The menu and selection transitions are painful to watch. Turning them off gives a much better experience.
• On an HDTV, areas such as the menu backgrounds and fonts are of a noticeably lower quality than within Media Center itself, or when using the Xbox 360 as an extender. These differences are largely unnoticeable on SDTV.
• There is no 4th Zoom option for watching a 4/3 video on a widescreen TV.
• All of the Media Center backgrounds, menus, and text appear embedded in the firmware. Due to this I feel it’s unlikely V2 extenders will be supported on the next major release of Media Center (and since the hardware already appears underpowered, this may not be a bad thing).

Overall I would say I’m neither impressed nor disappointed with the new extenders.  The experience is generally very good (once you turn off the transition animations) but at $250+ they feel overpriced and the startup time is disappointing.

If you’re looking for an extender for the living room, particularly for an HDTV,  then I’d suggest considering an XBox 360 (particularly the quieter model, or if you have a cabinet to muffle the fan sound). For a second extender in the bedroom then the Linksys V2 extenders are a good choice.

Footnote: I believe that the forthcoming extenders from companies such as D-Link are all based upon the same internal hardware, so the experiences are unlikely to differ much.