Netputing » Booting

NetBookInstaller 0.8.5 Preview Released

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:18:54 +0000

NetbookInstaller 0.8.5pre is now officially released. There will not be a final release of NBI 0.8.4. This is a preview / prerelease of the changes in store for 0.8.5, there are bound to be numerous bugs. Once bugs reported to Meklort are worked out + features finalized, he will release a 0.8.5 RC and go from there.

This version is very experimental and will most likely break things that are working. There are a few major changes in this version that have not been very well tested, so there may be regressions issues. The main highlights include that NetbookInstaller and NetbookBootMaker have been merged into one application. As far as Meklort can tell, there shouldnt be any issues with this.

The next major change is that NetbookInstaller nolonger patches the graphics and wireless kexts, this is done in the bootloader instead. What this means is that NBI no longer has to run after a major update to patch the operating system. It still does for now due to a bug with the Apple hda driver. The kext patching feature is experimental in the bootloader and may fail if the struction of a kernel extension changes after an update. In the event that this happens, the worse case scenario is that you will no longer have either wifi, QE, or both. In either case, Meklort will make sure that there is an update to fix the problem if he haven’t already released one. Do note that this change will cause the boot up process to take a longer time until the spinner, however it should be slightly shorter after that.

Lastly, Meklort has been focusing on supporting the Dell mini 1012 in this release, and support should be on par with the Dell Mini 1011 with the exception of hardware acceleration. The GMA3150 frambuffer kernel extension is patched in the boot loader, however the hardware acceleration kext is not yet.

via Meklorts Blog.

AirPrint Hacktivator 1.5 now available

admin — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:04:16 +0000

While trying to find out what makes the printer sharing ticking during a remove and add operation I noticed that it was necessary to restart cupsd to make the remove/add/share action work. Rebooting the Mac will essentially restart cupsd and then removing/adding/sharing printers will result in them showing in iOS 4.2 GM devices. But rebooting is a pain and not necessary…

So the new version on AirPrintHacktivator will now “restart” the cupsd process after hacktivating or “de hacktivating” AirPrint.

This should help resolve the issues some people have seen when Printers would not show up after removing/adding/sharing them back in the System Preferences.

Grab the AirPrintHacktivator right here.

Meklort has released NetbookInstaller 0.8.4pre

admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:36:41 +0000

Meklort says:

”

The latest version on NetbookInstaller has been released. There are a couple of new features but mostly just updated kexts from the previous version.

Updated Chameleon. I’ve also included numerous patches which are detailed in the previous post.
(Partial) Support for 64bit cpus. For best results boot in 32bit mode (arch=i386). I’ll try to update the 64bit kexts shortly and post an update.
Updated the bootloader code so that when chameleon is installed, it no longer messes up windows installations.
Added code so that in the event of a system update, NetbookInstaller is automatically run on reboot.
NetbookBootMaker no longer patches the install dvd, instead it installs a kext to patch the dvd at runtime (like NetbookCD). This means you’ll probably want to restore the install dvd (this won’t be required in the future since the dvd isn’t modified anymore).
Added a recovery option for chameleon. Just type “recover” and a known good set of kext will be loaded, while /Extra/Extensions.mkext will be ignored.

How to update to 10.6.3: The only requirement is that you have NetbookInstaller 0.8.4pre (or later) installed. Once you update the system, NBI will be run automatically.

NOTE: If when booting, you see the NBI logo, do *not* restart. This is indicating that NBI is running and updating files (/Extra) due to a system change. There currently is an issue where restarts take a while after NBI is running, just wait it out, eventually it’ll reboot again and start up to your desktop.

NOTE2: There is no Asus 1201n support in this build, I’ll try to get one out shortly (this weekend) for it.

NetbookInstaller 0.8.4 pre
NetbookBootMaker 0.8.4pre

”

Source: http://www.meklort.com/?p=186

Work in progress for next gen of NetbookBootInstaller by Meklort

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:19:36 +0000

: Image by Slaff via Flickr

In order to simplify the NetbookCD install process, we need some way to patch the dvd *after* it’s been loaded up. There are a few different ways to do this, however the easiest way is to use a feature built directly into the kernel, XNU.

It turns out that if the RAMDisk property exists in the device tree, xnu will automatically setup and mount a memory device that was previously loaded by the bootloader (in our case, Chameleon). Chameleon already supports loading ramdisks, so I’ve modified it to load a second, “Postboot.img” ramdisk form the preboot ramdisk (only way to get it off of the previously removed cd), and then setup the correct properties for the kernel. Now, in the event that apple removes the automount feature in xnu, we can easily write a simple kernel extension that does the equivalent (by using the mdevadd function).

I’ve uploaded an example postboot image as well as the patches to chameleon. They could be a *lot* better, but they work. The uploaded patch includes the following changes:

Notifies xnu of a ramdisk, if it loads one.
Modifies chameleon to look for Extensions/10.x/Extensions.mkext in the ramdisk like it does in the boot drive. (This allows for one boot cd instead of two like the current releases).
Included some of the hibernation patches from netkas / pcefi 10.4.
Modifies the memory layout so that a larger ramdisk can be used (NOTE: this is *not* needed, I only used it so that I could boot PureDarwin Nano from a ramdisk).
The included patch also includes backing up the original dsdt (which has been used for some time with NetbookInstaller).

read the rest via How To: Turn a Dell Mini 10v Into the Ultimate OSX Netbook.