Last week’s fun was getting Leopard to run correctly on retina, which is a Mac Mini, running 10.5.2. After spending many days patching Directory Services and Postfix issues, it was time to break another machine.I headed into the studio where I’ve got a dual-monitor OSX86 machine running JaS 10.4.8.

This is commodity PC hardware, running Tiger. I haven’t been able to upgrade the machine for months because of kernel issues, so I figured it was time to go to Leopard. I’m going to post some notes here in case you’d like to repeat my efforts and build yourself a Mac. Note that this is in complete violation of Apple’s licensing of OS X, and you do this at your own risk to your hardware and sanity. (At one point during this installation, I shorted out some fan cables to my system’s speaker, and caused a fire. Be careful!)

My Machine’s specs:

Gigabyte GA-965-S3 Motherboard

Intel E6400 2.4Ghz Core2 CPU

4GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2 Twin2X Memory (both bought in matched pairs)

2 x 250GB Western Digital SATA Drives

NVidia 7800GTX Graphics card

I also have a pile of accessories attached on a long USB extension cable:
Nostromo n52 gaming pad

Wacom Intous 6×8 Tablet

Microsoft Natural Keyboard and Microsoft Intellipoint Mouse

Installation was pretty straightforward once I discovered that you absolutely need to install this onto a blank drive with newly formed partitions. You cannot install over a 10.4 installation or a failed 10.5 installation. The EFI hack causes hardware to be incorrectly recogonized unless the partition is completely virgin.

What to do:

1. Find a copy of Kalyway’s 10.5.1 OS X DVD. I’m not telling you how to find this but I’m sure you know where to look.
2. Boot into the Kalyway disk. This will only work if your DVD ROM drive is plugged into SATA or if it’s on the PATA bus. For this mobo, you must have the HD plugged into the Orange (non-jmicron) SATA ports. The BIOS must be set to AHCI mode. Booting the DVD will take a long time because the OS loads a crappy DVD driver. Oh well. Just wait.
3. Format the disk. You want MBR mode, not GUI, and the standard partition format (not Apple, Not GUID.)
4. Install OS X with Customizations. In the installer, select:
   • Vanilla Kernels – check both including the ACPI Fix.
   • EFI in MBR
   • ALC 883 Sound
   • No Network Drivers
   • Pick the right video driver (I have a Nvidia 7800GTX, so I use Natit.)
5. At the end of the install, reboot the machine. Do not remove the DVD! No matter how long it takes for the machine to reboot, leave it alone. If you screw with it before it reboots, you will break something and have to start over. If you get the message “Installation failed”, you probably forgot to configure AHCI or you selected EFI in guid. GUID doesn’t seem to work for this board. If someone gets it working, tell me.
6. Go through the registration process.
7. At this point, you should have leopard running on your screen. You may or may not have network working – the Marvell Ethernet connector is very picky on this build and sometimes doesn’t work.
8. Many things work better under 10.5.2! To install 10.5.2, do not use system update! Download “kalway 10.5.2 combo updater” from your favorite torrent site. Install it. Reboot. Test everything. Now download “kalyway 10.5.2 kernels”. Choose the 2nd option which reads “patched by modbin”. Install that. Reboot. Test.
   • Generally this fix corrects the issue where it takes a long time to boot. Extended boot times are caused because your system is booting the 9.1.0 kernel under 10.5.2. The updater will update you to 10.5.2 with 9.2.0 kernel.

If you see these messages in /var/log/system.log:

Mar 2 14:32:08 xx-xx-mac-pro kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000000,00000000 PwrSavingsEED – Failed to get ACPI device
Mar 2 14:32:08 xx-xx-mac-pro kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000008,000002bd sktwsi – AppleYukon: error – TWSI: transfer does not completeor:
Mar 2 11:31:44 hackintosh kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000010,00000272 skgesirq – AppleYukon: error – PCI express protocol violation error
Mar 2 11:31:44 hackintosh kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000010,00000264 skgesirq – AppleYukon: error – unexpected IRQ Status error
Mar 2 11:31:44 hackintosh kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000000,00000000 skgehw – cppSkDrvEvent – SK_DRV_ADAP_FAIL

…You are running the new 10.5 AppleYukon2,kext, which breaks on this motherboard. This causes ethernet to randomly die under load. Go remove AppleYukon.kext and replace it with AppleYukon.kext from either the JaS disk or by finding another copy online. These files live in /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Plugins

Other notes:

Nostromo N52: use the 10.4 driver, it works great in leopard

Wacom – Driver version 6.05 is 10.5 compatible

I also migrated my home directory and all old applications over using the Leopard Migration Assistant. This took 10 hours but worked brilliantly (my home directory was 186 GB!)

Enjoy Leopard!