After rebooting both my laptop and Time Capsule, and even trying to create a fresh time machine image I finally discovered a way to fix this issue – downgrading to 7.4.1 of the Airport Extreme / Time Capsule firmware.

To do this open Airport Utility, hold down the “option” key on the keyboard and choose “BaseStation->Upload Firmware…” from the menu bar. You should now be able to downgrade your Time Capsule / Airport Extreme to previous firmware versions, and 7.4.1 works flawlessly with Time Machine / Snow Leopard 10.6.1 for me.

Hopefully this will save others from lots of head scratching

This will be the post I wish I could have found when I began using Fusion

• Get as much RAM as possible. You should have at least 1GB of RAM assigned to your VM and possibly more depending on how many programs you’re running.
• Even if you have a dual-core machine, don’t use the dual-virtual-cpu option.
• If you have the option, use a 64-bit operating system (XP 64-bit, Vista 64-bit, Windows 7 64-bit). For 64-bit VM’s Fusion will use Intel’s VT hardware extensions for virtualization which perform better for call-heavy workloads. See this post.
• Virtual SCSI drives perform better than virtual IDE drives. Note that XP discs do not come with SCSI support so you should use the “Easy Install” option in VMware which will slipstream them.
• Running a file-based Virtual Machine is much faster than a boot-camp partition. The reason seems to be that accessing to data on the NTFS boot-camp partition is slower than the HFS+ partition.
• Windows XP is faster than Vista.
• Windows 7 is faster than Vista.
• If you have the option, put your VM on an external or secondary disk. The more you can minimize access to your system disk the better.
• Some forums claim that static pre-allocated disks are faster than dynamically disks that grow as needed.. This doesn’t make much sense, other than when your dynamic disk must be resized every 2GB or so.

For reference; With VMware Fusion 2 on my 2.4GHz MacBook with 4GB RAM and running Windows 7 with no programs, Activity Monitor shows around 5-6% of CPU time being used.

So I have the new MacBook and after a week or so I’ve got to say love it.

It’s easily the best machine I’ve ever had and the specs are better than my old desktop system that’s now been consigned to the bin (or at least eBay).

For quite a while I was torn about whether to get the 2.4Ghz MacBook or the MacBook Pro. The cheapest Pro is about $400 more and with the base model you’re basically paying for a bigger and slightly better quality screen (1440×900 as opposed to 1280×800). In the end I figured that at home it’d mostly be plugged into an external display, and for portability the MacBook is a better choice (smaller, lighter, and marginally better battery life). This was definitely the right decision, the Pro is nice but I’m very happy with the more compact MacBook.

That said, as this is going to be my main machine I did bump the base-specs up to Ninja-level and added 4GB of RAM and replaced the hard-drive with a 320GB 7200 RPM model. For me the performance of SSD drives isn’t there quite yet, some of the latest drives are close but not at a price-point I’d consider.

The biggest-pain I’ve had so far is getting Bootcamp installed and working. If you have want two partitions for OSX & Windows setup it’s pretty easy to get working, but if you want a third partition to share data between them it gets tricky. With a lot of faffing around I eventually managed to get it working quite nicely. I had to spring for the Paragon NTFS driver though since I chose NTFS for the data drive (FAT32 is an awful choice for large drivers, and HFS+ support outside of OSX is pretty dire).

What’s really nice is that I can either boot directly into the Windows partition, or run it under OSX using VMware Fusion. I’ve used Virtual Machines for quite a while but being able to dual-use one like this is nifty.

Examples?

• The 802.11n firmware update that cost $3 for “accounting reasons”.
• The intentionally crippled calendar app on the original iPod Touch.
• The iPod Touch firmware updates. (Yes, $20 for five apps that took more time and effort to disable than to leave alone – “accounting reasons” again).
• The removal of boxed add-ins with later product revisions to increase margins – E.g. Apple Remote, The lack of a dock in the new iPhone, or how the iPod now comes with little more than a cable and a sticker.

One particularly close to home example is the new MacBooks. These are the first MacBooks with custom display ports that don’t come with an adapter – so after spending $2000 on a laptop you have to pay another $30 for a part that costs $2 to manufacture. Joy!

But I digress

After running Bootcamp setup and installing Vista 64-bit I pop in my OSX DVD to install the drivers for Vista 64-bit, only to see a message stating "Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer".

Wha!?

I know you can install Vista 64-bit on a new MacBook Pro. I know that aside from an extra graphics card, the MacBook and MacBook Pro hardware is the same. So surely the MacBook supports Vista 64-bit!?

No. Pro models only – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1846

At this point my bullshit detector is starting to sound. Looking at the contents of the DVD I find a number of self-installing drivers, and the BootCamp installer package that’s run by the setup program. Hmmm.. I wonder…

In the Start Menu Type “cmd”, then right-click on the program that appears and choose “Run As Administrator”.

Then enter;

D:
cd "Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple"
msiexec /i BootCamp64.msi

And hey-presto! After by-passing the Apple crippleware program all of the drivers and Bootcamp software install and run perfectly. Or at least as perfectly as bootcamp seems to work with the new touchpad – more on this another time.

Frankly this type of behavior is extremely disappointing. If a company such as Dell pulled this there’d be gangs of media howling for their blood. As usual though the “Apple smallprint” barely gets any attention.

I’m going to be doing a lot of Windows development over the next few months (WHS, Silverlight, ASP.NET) and would much prefer Vista so on Friday I spent some time doing a few benchmarks with both XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit.

(Originally I also planned to test the 32-bit version of Vista, but I couldn’t face an additional two hours of installs and service packs. Plus I decided to do Vista 64-bit after XP incase of any problems).

Note that this is very rough testing using three averaged runs of GeekBench. The OSX timings are included to measure the impact of running the VM, not to draw any comparisons between OSX / Windows performance. I don’t know how Geekbench compares across platforms.

Details:

• System: 2008 Macbook, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram, 7200RPM Drive
• VM: VMware Fusion 2.0, one VCore, 1.5GB Ram, running from bootcamp partition
• OSX: 10.5.5
• Windows: Windows XP Pro 32-bit SP3, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1
• Benchmark: GeekBench 2.0.19 for OSX and Windows (32-bit)

OSX Performance:

VM Performance

Note: The native times are running Windows via bootcamp which gives windows two cores with 3.5GB of ram under XP and 3.7GB under Vista 64 (~256MB are reserved for integrated graphics). Since the VM has one core and 1.5GB of ram I don’t expect the times to be close, I’m just interested in the performance differences between XP and Vista in each situation.

So what’s interesting about the results?

• The difference between XP and Vista-64 are approx 2% in both Fullscreen mode and Unity, whereas natively the difference is approx 6%.
• The difference in impact upon the host OS (OSX) appears to be even lower.
• Despite what I’d always assumed, Unity mode appears to be both faster than fullscreen and with a lower impact on the host. I guess it’s faster to skip the background than it is to separately overlay the windows.

So it looks like I’ll be sticking with Vista 64-bit for a while, or at least until I encounter some must-need program that has 64-bit issues which I’d pessimistically give a 50/50 chance.

And just to reiterate that this is extremely rough testing and many of these figures could be complete rubbish. It’d also have been interesting to test XP / Vista when both were under more load. 

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.

Beginning Setup

Place your patched Leopard DVD in the tray of your DVD drive, make sure “Boot from CD” is enabled in your BIOS, and restart your machine. When the machine restarts you should hear the DVD start to spin and see some text from Darwin, the OS X boot loader. After this you’ll be at a command prompt ready to start the setup.

(Note: All commands should be entered without “quotes”).

If you’re using Kalyway at this point you can type “vanilla” to test whether your hardware will run with an unmodified kernel. Mine doesn’t so I can’t tell you what a successful test looks like, but if your machine reboots itself the test failed

At the command prompt you can press enter to continue normally, or “-v” to switch to verbose startup where each step of the process is displayed on screen. Verbose is especially useful for diagnosing “Kernel Panic” problems, a situation where the kernel encounters an error during startup. We’ll talk more about this later.

Disk Preparation

After the initial OSX startup screens the first task is prepare the partition or disk where you’ll be installing OSX. This is done by using Disk Utility which is in the “Utilities” menu bar. If you are setting up a dual boot machine I’ll assume you’ve already created a separate partition as described in the preparations post and you can skip the next paragraph.

If you’re installing OSX on an empty disk then you must first create a partition table for the disk. The partition table  is what defines the layout of your disk and there are two choices,  “GUID” (Globally Unique Identifier) or MBR (Master Boot Record) table. You can think of a GUID table as being Mac-only so if you plan to dual-boot either now or later then you must choose an MBR table. To create a new partition table select the “Partition” tab and choose a new scheme (1/2/3/etc partitions). Make sure the format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and apply the changes. Note: This will erase all data on your disk. If you are setting up a dual boot follow the next paragraph instead.

If you’re installing onto an existing partition then you will need to format the target position to the Mac’s HFS+ (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) filesystem. If you’re reinstalling OSX make sure you still do this to prevent old files causing conflicts. To format a partition first select it the left hand list. The names you see here are likely to be entirely different from those you see in Windows/GParted etc so verify the information at the bottom of Disk Utility is as you’d expect. To perform the actual format click the “Erase” tab, choose a Volume Format of “Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and select “Erase”.

After you’ve got a freshly formatted Mac OS Extended partition, you can exit Disk Utility and return to the installation program.

Package Choices

Proceed through setup and look for the “Customize” button since this is how you select the packages needed to get OSX running on your PC. The exact packages you see will depend upon whether you’re running Kalyway or iATKOS, but they share a lot in common.

Vanilla kernel or not: You first package choice depends on whether you are able to run the Vanilla/Stock kernel or not. Only Core Duo chips have a chance of using the vanilla kernel. As mentioned above you can test this with the Kalyway DVD before starting setup, but with iATKOS you will have to try it and see.

If you choose the vanilla Kernel make sure you also choose the vanilla ACPI. Similarly, if you CANNOT run the vanilla Kernel, make sure BOTH the Kernel and ACPI packages are unchecked.

CPU Patches: There are two other packages that may be required to get a working machine; SSE2 and CPUPowerManagement. These are for CPUs which do not support SSE3 instructions, and for motherboards where the power management interface is sufficiently different that it causes problems.

In my experience the CPUPowerManagement package is often the cause of trouble for some machines. Don’t worry, if you need to disable it by installing should be able to fix power management later.

Driver Packages: Although there’s a good selection of drivers for ATI/NVidia cards, the selection of network and sound drivers are very sparse and you’ll likely have to install additional kext files after setup. Try and pick the correct package for your ATI / NVidia card based upon whether it’s desktop/laptop, and the amount of memory. My Geforce 8800 works perfectly with NVInject. Multi-monitor and hardware acceleration function fine in OSX (I was surprised, but delighted).

Boot Packages: To boot the system you will need a package that handles whether your drive is uses an MBR or GUID partition scheme. Some OSX86 installations will set this automatically for you, with others you must choose. If you are able to choose you must pick the package that corresponds to your choice in Disk Preparation. For most people, this will be MBR.

Installation and on!

At this point you should have selected all of the appropriate packages so continue through until setup begins. After setup completes your machine will reboot and you will end up with one of several results.

The next post in this little series will cover these problems in more detail and show how to achieve the result you want but I’ll briefly explain what you may see after install and what it means.

1) Your Windows/Linux login screen

You have a boot partition on your disk with another OS and this is being used instead of OSX while booting. As far as I know this can happen with iATKOS since it leaves your existing boot choice intact. To fix this you need to either configure dual-booting on your existing OS, or flag your OSX partition as the boot partition using something like GParted. When you have done this you may still encounter #3 or #4

2) The Leopard Startup video

(or if you left your machine for sometime, a screen which asks to help identify your keyboard)

This is great! It means your computer can boot and run OSX!

There’s a catch however – If you’ve just completed installation then the chances are your machine booted from DVD and the OSX installer found and booted your OSX disk partition. When you eject the disc you may still encounter #3 or #4.

3) A black screen with a blinking cursor or error message at the top left corner

This can happen when your OSX partition cannot be booted from. In my experience this can occur with Kalyway, or when trying to setup a dual-boot machine. To fix this you usually need to repair/set information on whichever partition you wish to boot from (e.g. Vista/OSX).

GParted will allow you to make this choice by setting the flags on a partition. If you find you can no longer boot from your original partition then you may need to repair the information it contains. How to do this depends on your OS, for Vista pop in your setup DVD and choose “Repair” during setup.

4) A machine which boots and either before or during the Apple startup reboots, then does this continually in a loop

This signifies a hardware incompatibility during the boot process. If your machine reboots before the Apple logo then it’s likely to be a kernel error, e.g. your machine cannot run the vanilla kernel. If it reboots during the Apple logo then it’s a Kernel Panic. Kernel Panics are when the kernel encountering a fatal error during startup.

If you enter -v at the boot prompt then each stage of the boot process will be displayed and if a kernel panic occurs the problem kext (Kernel Extension) will be displayed. This should help you identify the package involved (e.g. PowerManagement).

–

Good luck, and don’t be disheartened if things don’t work the first time. It took me three or four attempts and a lot of Googling before I was rewarded by the Leopard startup video – and it then took several more hours of googling before I had things booting from disk instead of DVD

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.

(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.

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.

Overview

Without a great deal of effort a regular OSX 10.5 (Leopard) DVD cannot be installed on your PC. The differences between the hardware used in PCs and Macs require various patches to be installed before Leopard can run. Fortunately two camps of people have done a fantastic job of merging these patches with the Leopard installer, resulting in a DVD package that CAN be booted and installed on a regular PC. These packages are referred to as iATKOS and Kalyway and can be found on your favorite torrent site or newsgroup. (Note: there are other patched installs that show promise, but these two are currently the most streamlined and well known).

The Legal Bit

Because both packages come as complete Leopard installs they are some obvious legal issues involved. In addition, the Leopard software agreement limits its use to an “Apple-labeled computer”. If you plan on using Leopard you should absolutely purchase a legal copy, after which downloading a patched version is a legally gray but likely defensible area. The agreement refers to an “Apple-labeled” computer and not “Apple-manufactured’, so putting one of those Apple stickers that came with your iPod or something similar on your computer should also be enough to comply here.

Which Package?

As far as choosing between iATKOS and Kalyway I did several installs with each, and although iATKOS was less problematic I have to say overall I prefer Kalyway. (Some of the problems I experienced with Kalyway could have been due to previously installing iATKOS on the same partition. It was wiped between installs but as we’ll see later this is only part of the story).

In addition both packages install 10.5.1 of Leopard meaning additional work is needed to upgrade to 10.5.2. Using the official Apple 10.5.2 update is the fastest way to break your new install. Only Kaly has released a package to upgrade to 10.5.2 and while in my experience this worked without problem on an iATKOS install, I prefer not to complicate things.

The quality of both packages is impressive and both offer a selection of compatibility options for the hardware in your PC. Kalyway has a few less options as some things are determined automatically, but you can also pre-test whether your machine will be able to run with an un-patched kernel prior to installing. On the otherhand iATKOS is a smaller download, quicker to boot from DVD, and installs faster.

iATKOS seemed easier to get working in a dual boot setup with Vista. Kalyway seemed to be a better experience once installed. Kalyway comes with some preinstalled apps and theme changes that most people seem to dislike, but then these are easy to revert and some of the apps are things you’d install anyway.

From my experience here are the Pros and Cons of each.

iATKOS

Pros

• Smaller, fast to boot from DVD, quick to install. (It will likely take several installs to get things perfect so this is handy).
• Does not automatically set your boot partition. Good for setting up a dual-boot system.
• More options in the setup screen allow you some extra choices and knowledge about what is patched in your system for later updates.

Cons

• Has several things stripped out for size reasons. It’s difficult to know what these are or what may be affected later.
• Some customizations (Red Apple, About box) are not easy to remove
• I believe since the R2 revision of their package the team behind iATKOS has fragmented making future updates or packages less-likely.

Kalyway

Pros

• DVD allows you to test whether your system will boot with the vanilla Apple kernel without having to do a “test install”
• Automatically sets your boot partition to the new install. Good for installing OS X as the sole OS on a PC.
• Basically a vanilla Leopard install with patches.
• Kaly seems extremely active in the OSX86 community and has released patches allowing OSX86 users to upgrade to 10.5.2

Cons

• Comes with customizations you are unlikely to want (desktop, colors, dock, some apps).

My vote? Kalyway.

In my next post I’ll cover the things you should be aware of prior to attempting an installation of either package and explain a few of the things I found confusing.

Lifehacker have a great guide to installing Kalyway on your PC, complete with pictures.