Category Archives: Software

Lion on the Hackintosh

Hackintosh, OS X

A bit tricky, but now working.

My Hackintosh was resolutely refusing to download Lion from the App Store, telling me the new OS cannot be installed. Despite trying every trick in the book, I was stuck. My Hackster is the original Adam Pash Lifehacker build (click Hackintosh menus at the bottom of the page) and despite many upgrades to hardware – RAM, HDDs, two SSDs, better cooling, you name it – has been rock solid for the past two years, running 7/24. I have little need for the new things in Lion, many of which seek to emulate the IOS experience and to some extent dumb down Mac OS, but am aware that once you fall behind, Apple has every incentive to brick your machine so they can sell you a new one. As I got tired of recycling Apple’s poor hardware and of the related burning smell from its graphics cards, I very much decided to go with OS Lion ASAP to keep my Hackster burbling along, if not boiling.

Time to call FU.

What follows was written by my old geek buddy FU Steve, who was responsible for building the HackPro originally. ‘I’ refers to FU in what follows:

*****

So I went to Thomas’s MacMini (Core2Duo CPU), had him pay $29.99, downloaded Lion and, before hitting install, copied the installation file to an 8gB USB flash card – like the one used in cameras. The Lion license applies to all machines you own – no more Family Pack premia. Thomas uses the Mini as a Home Theater PC only – it’s too lightweight for his heavy duty processing needs.

After experimenting with various methods, I settled on the Kakewalk one, mainly because it provides specific support for Thomas’s Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard. This mobo uses the Intel Core2Quad (Q9550) CPU, clocked at 2.83gHz and while that’s considered dated, your Mac is as fast as its slowest part which, for Thomas, is his mediocre AT&T broadband. There’s no reason to junk the mobo, CPU and RAM just because something theoretically faster on paper is out there. If Kakewalk works as well for you as it does for me, please be sure to make a donation to the author.

You can download Kakewalk here. It supports a very large variety of motherboards and graphics cards; the complete list is here. You will also need Chameleon 2.0 RC5-r1083 – Google it. That’s the small app which makes a drive or partition bootable. With the Lion flash card in one USB slot and another empty 8gB flash card in another USB slot (both originally formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), GUID partition), create the USB installer on the empty flash card. Now here’s where the Kakewalk instructions failed me. I restarted and tried booting from the Kakewalk USB flash drive, as instructed. No go. Some research disclosed others were having difficulty here, so I did what follows.

First, be aware that Thomas uses two SSDs in his Hackintosh. Boot and Backup. (His Data and Data backup are on HDDs).

  • I divided the Backup SSD into two partitions – 110gB and 10gB, the latter named Lion.
  • I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone SSD Boot to SSD Backup and tested that I could boot from SSD Backup.
  • I then cloned the Kakewalk USB flash drive to the SSD Backup – Lion partition.
  • Next I ran Chameleon and applied it to each of SSD Boot, SSD Backup and SSD Backup-Lion, testing the first and second in turn to make sure I could boot from either.
  • Then I removed the Kakewalk USB flash card from the USB port (essential or the system freezes), restarted and told the Hackintosh to boot from the SSD Backup-Lion partition. Tons of script scrolled by and the installer started.
  • I told the installer to install Lion to SSD Backup (which contains Snow Leopard and all Thomas’s applications) and after about 5 minutes (SSDs are fast) the installation was done.
  • Next I restarted and told the Hackster to boot from SSD-backup and all was well.

What’s going on here? The Chamelon app works off a hard drive or SSD but will not work off a USB flash card. By cloning the USB install data to a partition on the Backup SSD I made it possible to boot the installation ‘disk’ from the SSD. An HDD will work as well, but will be slower.

This is what greeted me after restarting from SSD Backup:

The CPU is actually an Intel Core2Quad, but Kakewalk is fooling the OS into believing it’s a Xeon as the Core4Quad was never shipped in any Mac.

The beauty of this approach is that you are installing onto a drive which already contains all your apps, so no use of Migration Utility is required.

Thomas had me run a bunch of tests on apps and hardware he uses most. Here are the results.

First steps after installation included downloading the Java update from Lion’s Software Update, updating Apple Mail (click), updating SpamSieve for Mail (click-click), installing the updated 1Password (essential for Thomas) and generally getting a feel for things.

What does not work:

First, the OWC Sales/Newer Technology USB->DVI adapter no longer works, meaning Thomas has lost the use of the third Dell 2209WA display he uses; the Hackster has but one Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU card and that supports only two displays. The third needs the USB->DVI adapter. This will have to await a software update for Lion; System Preferences->Displays still ‘sees’ the third Dell. (See ‘Anomalies’ below).The alternative wireless dongle from Newer Technology does not work, another candidate for a software update. No old PPC apps work – Quicken 2003/5/6/7 (Thomas converted all his Quicken 2005 data to iWork, the least bad alternative, and they are all bad), EyeOne Match for the EyeOne Display2 colorimeter, as discussed earlier here.

Update: OWC has released an updated driver for the dongle and all is now well.

Sleep:

I could never get Sleep to work in Snow Leopard – any version. If you put the computer to sleep using the mouse or to timed sleep (System Preferences->Energy Saver) the BIOS would be reset and the Hackintosh would refuse to restart, requiring a complete boot cycle. As Thomas requires ‘instant on’ functionality, he simply left his Hackintosh running 7-by-24. Very energy wasteful.

Well, Sleep still does not work with the factory provided Lion OS; the BIOS is trashed and has to be recovered on restart. Even worse than with Snow Leopard. But I have finally managed to get it working in Lion – keyboard/mouse or timed. You need to replace the SleepEnabler.kext kernel extension in Lion. To do so, download the Kext installer here – it’s named KextBeast. Then download the replacement SleepEnabler.kext here. Install it. Sleep now finally works. Set your preferences for Sleep in System Preferences->Energy Saver.

What does work:

Sound and wireless broadband (TP-Link card with an Atheros chip emulating Airport) worked immediately.

Photography applications:

  • Lightroom 3.4.1 with Camera Raw 6.4.1 – no issues. Running in 64-bit mode.
  • iPhoto ’09 v 8.1.2 – no issues.
  • Bonjour printing – all Thomas’s printing is wireless. Brother HL-2170W monochrome laser printer – perfect. Hewlett Packard HP DJ90 color inkjet dye printer – perfect. Tested by making a big print from Lightroom. Phew! Real deal breaker for Thomas if this failed.
  • Photoshop CS5 v 12.0.2 64-bit – no issues

Speed benchmarks:

Geekbench – CPU performance:

In OS Snow Leopard 10.6.7:

On OS Lion 10.7.0:

That’s virtually identical.

For reference, here’s Geekbench running on my MacBook Air, the one with the 1.4gHz Intel Core2Duo CPU:

Those running Intel Core-i7 CPUs with 1333mHz RAM can expect a score of around 12,000 with up to 16,000 on the fastest (and costliest) systems.

Cinebench:

You can see how Thomas’s Hackintosh compares with some of the fastest machines out there in this test – here’s the Open GL test. The GPU is an Nvidia 9800GTX+:

And here’s the CPU test – you want to make sure your machine is really well cooled before doing these:

CPU operating temperature:

The key design brief for my Hackintosh was exceptional cooling. Thomas lost several MacBooks and iMacs to overheating. Here’s the recent history of the steady state idling CPU temperature in his machine:

OS Snow Leopard 10.6.0 through 10.6.7 – 107F
OS Snow Leopard 10.6.8 – 115F
OS Lion 10.7.0 – 115F

Snow Leopard 10.6.8 incorporated much of the Lion code and accounted for the 8F temperature rise. Lion keeps it unchanged, so realistically Lion runs 8F warmer than Snow Leopard. That’s never a good thing, but with a case temperature operating limit for the Intel Core2Quad Q9550 of 176F, there’s lots of headroom left. If your CPU is a Core2Duo the operating limit is higher – check it at Intel’s excellent site.

Other useful apps which work fine (nearly all have been reviewed by Thomas here – click the search box at the top of the page):

  • Total Finder – Finder with tabs and split screen
  • Moom – screen splitter
  • HideSwitch – shows invisible system files
  • Firefox 5.0.1 – second rate browser
  • Fingerprint – print from an iPad or iPhone
  • Transmit – with an update
  • Dropbox – what MobileMe should be
  • MouseLocator – flashes a green circle to help find the mouse cursor – see ‘Anomalies’ below
  • NetNewsWire – RSS feed aggregator
  • ImageWell – used for posting images to blogs

Other applications which do not work yet – meaning they probably do not work on genuine Macs either:

  • LogmeIn – remote desktop. Update July 25, 2010 – LogMeIn just issued a new desktop Lion app upgrade and the app now works properly.
  • Realtek Wireless Utility for Newer Technology wireless USB dongle – fixed – new driver installed
  • Newer Technology USB to DVI display adapter and software – fixed – new driver installed
  • SecondBar – shows the menu bar on all displays – fixed – see ‘Anomalies’ below
  • TrimEnabler – garbage management on SSDs – fixed – just re-download and re-install the current Snow Leopard version

Anomalies:

  • Thomas uses Dell 2209WA displays, which come equipped with two USB pass-through sockets per display. These USB sockets have ceased working though I have confirmed that the related sockets on the Hackintosh work fine. There’s a driver update here and once installed the third display comes back to life and the Dell USB pass through sockets become live again! Further, the new driver finally allows screenshots to be made from the related display.
  • The Hackintosh has a built-in Sony SDHC card reader. This has ceased working. However, plugging Thomas’s SDHC card into an inexpensive Transcend USB card reader and plugging this reader into one of the two front USB sockets on the Hackintosh has the card recognized and readable.
  • Re-downloading TRIM Support Enabler and reinstalling it has TRIM working on both SSDs, as confirmed by System Report-Hardware-SerialATA.
  • MouseLocatorAgent – causes jerky mouse cursor behavior, so switched off in System Preferences.
  • AirDrop, Apple’s new file sharing technology, does not work on the Hackintosh, but is fine on other Lion-equipped Macs.
  • Second Bar is a wonderful utility which permits display of the Finder menu bar on multiple displays. There’s an update for Lion, though it does not work on USB-DVI connected displays. The Snow Leopard version is unstable.
  • AirDisplay, which permits the use of an iPad as a second (or third or fourth or ….) display, needs a new driver for the Hackintosh.

Final steps:

With everything working well, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone SSD-Backup to SSD-Boot and restarted from SSD-Boot, the default startup drive. I left the SSD Backup Lion partition in place in the event Lion ever needs to be installed elsewhere, or reinstalled. If the drive with the installer fails, Thomas has the SDHC flash card installer which can be cloned to a new drive from which a fresh installation can be made. The beauty of this approach is that a fresh install can be made to any drive. The latter need not contain any predecessor OS.

So if you, like Thomas and I, are a reluctant but resigned upgrader to Lion and use a Macintosh, things overall do not look too bad. I expect Thomas to get an easy two more years from his HackPro.

*****

Thank you FU Steve, for all your hard work in keeping the HackPro current.

This blog post was written and posted from within Lion.

Does a Hackintosh make sense? An addendum from FU Steve.

With the latest iMacs increasingly price competitive and very fast, do the blood, toil, tears and sweat involved in crafting a Hackintosh still make sense? Thomas addressed this at length here. In summary, if you want the last word in robustness, reliability, easy parts availability worldwide and low repair costs there is no Mac, whether Mini, iMac or Pro, which compares with a Hackintosh. Further, modern software ‘builds’ allow the OS to be updated using Software Update, with manual labor only involved at major version changes. If you need the latest in CPUs/GPUs/RAM speed you would be building a Hackintosh with Intel’s fastest i7 CPU, an ATI Radeon HD5970 graphics card and 16-32gB of 1666 mHz RAM. Your all in price would still be less than half that of a MacPro and parts availability/upgradability infinitely better. So it’s a ‘horses for courses’ decision. With the exception of the MacPro, there is no Mac made which I would trust when it comes to reliability under hard use, all failing the test of proper ventilation/cooling with exorbitant repair costs when they break once out of warranty.

Since Thomas wrote that piece, the iMac and Mini have added Thunderbolt high speed data ports; this is Intel’s LightPeak technology on which Apple has a one year exclusive, meaning that PCI-E LightPeak cards will become available for PCs some time in early 2012. Tests confirm that this technology is faster than USB2 by an order of magnitude (meaning ten times faster) and is faster than eSATA. If you are moving large quantities of data – like video files or BluRay movies – this is a worthwhile investment and Thomas has told me he will likely ask me to add a card to the Hackster once disk drives sporting Light Peak connectivity become common and affordable.

The capacious box of the Hackintosh not only provides ample space for cooling radiators and fans, it also accommodates many drives:

Drives in the Hackintosh. All are internal (labels are wrong) except
TimeMachine which is in an external cradle.

You can see how all these drives work together by clicking here.

Lightroom with Shutterfly

Lightroom

Calendars on the fly.

There are few better ways of sharing your pictures than with a calendar. You can be sure the recipient will display each of your twelve snaps for a month, which is a lot more attention than they command on your website or blog!

Further, forget the tired system that has the year beginning in January – your calendar can start any month you want.

Don McKee has an excellent and free Lightroom export plugin for Lightroom available here – I have tested it with the current LR v. 3.4.1 with Mac OS 10.6.8 and can confirm it works fine. (Update October 2012 – works fine with LR 4.2 and OS Mountain Lion 10.8.2, but you have to re-download and install it into LR after upgrading from LR3 to LR4). Don says it works with Windows and he has tested it back as far as Lightroom 2.1.

The quickest way to assemble your calendar is to go into Library view in Lightroom v2 or v3 (hit G to go to Library Grid view), click a picture you want to add and hit B, which places it in a Quick Collection. Then, when you have your 13 pictures selected (12 + 1 for the cover), go to Catalog->Quick Collection in LR and:

  • Select all the pictures – Command-A
  • Hit Command-Shift-E to bring up the Export dialog.
  • Select Shutterfly at the top of the Export pane and fill in your account details.

I like to export JPGs sized 1600 x 1600 so as not to run into quality issues. 800 x 800 restricts prints to 5″ x 7″ whereas 1600 x 1600 takes you to 20″ x 30″.

The LR3 Shutterfly Export dialog. Note the Post-Processing action at the bottom.

When the export is complete you will be automatically transferred to your Shutterfly page if you followed the above settings.

The Shutterfly page with the pictures exported from LR3.

Thereafter you can arrange these as you see fit. If the quality of an image is deemed poor, you will be warned, and will probably want to export a higher quality version. Another reason to export larger size images than you think you need.

The Calendar function in Shutterfly is superb and there are many formats to choose from. I like the simple Photo Gallery, one photo per page.

Assembly and ordering took me all of 15 minutes for a truly professional looking result. This one runs from August to July. If you choose, Shutterfly will mail these to your recipient of choice. I had to pays sales tax on one sent to Massachusetts, but none on one mailed to California.

The completed calendar – two for $57, shipped.

Order to shipping was under 24 hours for the three calendars ordered. Impressive.

Moom

Software

Fixing the green blob.

One of the weakest features of Apple’s OS X operating system is the Finder. It has never supported split windows, though that was put to rights with Total Finder which I have been using for six months now and recommend unreservedly. True, it’s $15 for something which should come with OS X, but the makers do a stellar job of keeping it updated for each new OS major or minor release and once you have used it there’s no going back if smooth file movement between drives and directories is your thing. TotalFinder addresses one of the few remaining shortcomings of OS X.

As for the other major one, well, it’s a ‘feature’ which didn’t work in Cheetah, OS X 10.0. And it has continued broken in all of Cheetah’s successors – Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard.

And I’ll bet you it will not work in Lion.

I am talking, of course, about the wretched green blob. It’s the colored ball toward the top left of every window you open in OS X.

Clicking it is meant to expand the window to full screen. What could be simpler? .

Except that clicking it has results about as predictable and consistent as the pronouncements of your elected representative. Meaning it simply cannot be trusted as what it does seems to vary with the day of the week, the weather and the demeanor of your dog. Maybe it needs a good bribe, like your Congressman or Senator, to actually do what it’s paid for?

And if, like me, you have no fewer than three displays with multiple windows attached to your computer, then moving windows around is a real pain. But I know better than to complain to a company which rarely listens to its customers and curse quietly every time I try to grab the window size repositioning area at the lower right of an open window, miss, try again, then curse some more when moving the window into place, only to find that I have to resize yet again.

So I have given up complaining about the green blob, having long ago assumed that it’s just one of those non-facts of life like US military intelligence (MIA), US Energy policy (none) or the US electoral system of one-man-one-vote (in the US we have one-dollar-one-vote).

Well, with Moom, the green blob finally works. And it works as well with multiple displays as with one.

Moom accomplishes what none of the alternatives does. A simple and intuitive way to make any window full screen, properly positioned. Or half-screen come to that, which is even more useful. For real masochists, you can even go to quarter screen or any rectangle or position of your choice. Moom allows you to program any shape and position you like and those will be added to the pop-up-on-hover, below. The implementation could scarce be improved upon. Just hover your mouse cursor over the green blob and this is what you will see:

The rest is self-explanatory.

It works perfectly, and the download gives you 100 free goes. Thereafter it’s $10.

Click the picture below to go to Moom’s web site:

Click the picture for Moom’s web site.

And as for you, Apple, you can kiss my Moom.

A bully gets his

Software

Avoid ‘in app’ purchases.

Did you know that every time you make a purchase of an app on your iDevice or using the AppStore icon on your Mac that you are giving 30% of the developer’s income to a corporation which systematically defrauds US taxpayers daily?

Yes, that’s the fee Apple extracts when you do so. The ‘sell’ is that it reimburses AAPL for running the AppStore (a bigger mess you will not find on the web) and that they are making your life easy. Trust us, we’re Apple and your well being is our sole interest – when we are not avoiding paying taxes on the $17 billion in cash we have stashed offshore, that is and have largely avoided paying any corporation taxes on our vast annual income.

Sure, you could still sell your app from your own web site, but the price had to be the same and no reference to your web site was permitted in the AppStore version of your app.

It doesn’t take a moment’s thought to realize that magazines, newspapers and small software writers could not possibly make a profit after Apple extracted its 30%. So not only was this policy ruinous to these vendors it actually hurts Apple. It’s never a good idea to put your providers out of business.

Well, in the good, old fashioned English public school I attended, we really disliked bullies. It was deeply inculcated in pupils that bullying is just not on. So well was this message conveyed that when there was a rare case of playground bullying, you could bet that the perpetrator would be approached by four of the burlier members of the rugby team, marched to the men’s room, his head stuck down the porcelain bowl and the flush cord pulled. What it lacked in subtlety it more than made up for in effectiveness.

Appropriately enough it took the British to put a stop to Apple’s bullying ways. Pearson, the publisher of the estimable Financial Times, just stuck the fruit company’s greedy head down the proverbial toilet. And flushed.

You can bet that the FT will shortly discontinue its presence in Apple’s AppStore all together. I changed immediately to the new app and can confirm it works just fine. And there’s more content too. Plus where else do you go for objective financial news?

At the recent WWDC hoopla (wow! Lion has more bells and whistles no one needs and screw you if you use Rosetta apps ….) Apple made much of how the AppStore was selling millions/billions/trillions of apps, or some such idiocy. Yes, and their growing software distribution monopoly nets them 30% a pop.

So here is my suggestion. By all means search for photography and magazine apps in the AppStore for your Mac. But when you find something you like, hop over to the developer’s/publisher’s web site and buy directly from them. (Sadly, you have no choice in the matter with iDevice apps, unless you elect to hack your iDevice). You put that 30% in the developers’ pockets, where it is sorely needed. You certainly don’t need to send it to a US corporation which has paid negligible corporation taxes for years and has $70 billion in the bank as a result. Yes, a big chunk of that is your money, US taxpayers.

Let Dr. P. put Apple’s ways in perspective for you.

Here’s the Income tax footnote from their last annual SEC filing:

Forget all that ‘deferred tax’ baloney. Those are not cash payments. So total taxes AAPL paid in 2010 were $3.1bn on net income of $18.5bn or 16.8%, compared to a federal corporation tax rate of 35%, or more than twice the rate AAPL paid. Then add in the fact that somehow Apple makes the claim that less than half of its sales were in the US and the most they will have paid in US taxes is maybe $1.5bn.

And you want them to extort developers and publishers for 30%? I didn’t think so.

Developers? Offer reduced function apps through the AppStore and get the word out that the real thing can be had from your web site. Stop feeding the bully. And make sure your AppStore version flashes a sign to your full featured app, just the way the FT is doing it. Apple has not had the brazen cheek to try and stop that.

CrashPlan – Part V

Software

Adding more.

In Part IV I mentioned that I had copied all my photo files to CrashPlan’s cloud storage.

As there are currently no limits on storage volumes, and I do not expect this status to prevail, I have been gradually moving other non-photo data to CrashPlan on the assumption that unlimited volume rights will be grandfathered if they decide to charge for large storage spaces. I have signed up for three years at CrashPlan and now have over 300gB of data on their servers.

Here’s how the storage paths selected for cloud backup look at CP:

CrashPlan directories.

When inputting new paths, the best way is to drag and drop the folder from Finder on your Mac to the above CP box. Typing in the path does not cut it – Finder omits the suffix “.aplibrary” from the Aperture database, for example, and without it the back-up will fail. Further, remember to add the trailing slash (‘/’) or the back-up will fail. Irritating quirks and CP really needs to adopt a visual icon based approach, compared to this geeky one.

How about Applications? Increasingly applications are purchased by download, so all you need keep in the cloud is information relating to your serial number and related access keys. Uploading gigabytes of applications to the cloud makes no sense. It’s also likely you will miss one or more of the hidden directories many applications use. Just re-download the app if you lose the original (assuming the vendor is still in business), then re-input the key. Rather than using CrashPlan I strongly recommend 1Password used in combination with a free DropBox account. The latter will not only store all your keys remotely, but also provides efficient syncing of all your 1Password data to all your Macs and iDevices. After many months of use I can confirm it works properly. 1Password is an application every Mac or iDevice user should own.

Here’s an extract of the Software section in my copy of 1Password:

What about software you bought on DVDs? For me that leaves the truly awful Intuit Quicken. I store that DVD offsite.

CrashPlan’s warning feature:

CrashPlan will backup even if your computer is logged out; however it cannot do so if the machine is switched off. That happened with my HackPro the other day when, for the first time in ages, I left it off overnight while doing some hardware maintenance. I received the following alert from CrashPlan in my email the next day – a nice feature: