I am posting this to document my upgrade from Snow Leopard to OSX Lion on my osx86 machine. If it helps anyone, then that’s a bonus!
The system I am using is based on a Gigabyte GA G31-E2SL (rev 2.3) mainboard, a Nvidia 7600GS, 2 x 1TB Western Digital SATA2 drives and 2 x 2GB DDR2.
The system could probably do with a little more RAM but should be adequate for experimental and testing purposes.
Installation
The first step in my install was to purchase the “Install Mac OS X Lion Application” from the Mac App Store. I then used the very helpful UniBeast guide to do a clean install via a USB flash drive. From there I wiped Snow Leopard and did a clean install of Lion. After the install completed I, ran the latest version of MultiBeast, using only the EasyBeast install option, to get the system to a bootable state.
This gave me a nice clean install of OSX Lion with no network or sound. There were also issues with my graphics since I was only getting 1024×768. In addition, any time I inserted a USB drive, I got a kernel panic.
Graphics
My initial focus was to get graphics working correctly. Initially I tried setting GraphicsEnabler to True. This didn’t work and I got an immediate kernel panic as soon as the system tried to initialise the window manager. I then tried NVenabler from MultiBeast. This gave me the same result of a kernel panic on bootup. It turned out that I was overthinking things. It was actually pretty simple and involved changing /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist from the default to:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Kernel</key> <string>mach_kernel</string> <key>Kernel Flags</key> <string>arch=i386 npci=0x2000 PCIRootUID=1</string> <key>GraphicsEnabler</key> <string>Yes</string> <key>Timeout</key> <string>5</string> <key>Legacy Logo</key> <string>Yes</string> <key>EthernetBuiltIn</key> <string>Yes</string> <key>UseKernelCache</key> <string>Yes</string> </dict> </plist>
After a quick reboot I had full accelerated graphics running at native resolution.
Network
Next up was getting the network working. Being disconnected was starting to get a little annoying at this stage. There is a really good driver for the Atheros NIC in my mainboard which I believe was developed from the ground up for osx86 systems.
To install the Atheros kext I used Kext Helper which is a great utility. It fixes all of the necessary permissions and also rebuilds the kernel cache. A really simple drag and drop way to install a kext.
After rebooting there was some peculiar behaviour in that I didn’t get a IPv4 DHCP address but I did get a IPv6 address from my static IPv6 /56 subnet. There was also some strange intermittent freezes when I opened the Network configuration initially. I was able to assign a manual IPv4 address and after disabling IPv6 the intermittent freezing stopped (perhaps a conincidence?). I will have to revisit this more in depth, later.
With those issues address, I now had a working network connection.
Audio
It had been a while since I originally set up my Snow Leopard install so I had since forgotten how to get my on-board sound working. The first thing I tried was HDA enabler for the ALC888b. This didn’t work. I didn’t get any kernel panics, but I didn’t get any sound either.
With that failure I deleted AppleHDA.kext and HDAenabler888b.kext from /System/Library/Extensions and installed VooDooHDA 2.7.2. And after a quick reboot I had working sound!
Note: The VoodooHDA.kext needs to be in the /System/Library/Extensions directory. I tried it in /Extra/Extensions and it didn’t work!
In closing
So after not much messing around, I had a clean install of OSX Lion with all of the important things working. I haven’t touch on many of the new Lion features. So far the most noticeable new features are Mission Control and Launchpad.
On previous versions of OSX I have been a big fan and avid user of both Expose and Spaces. The new Mission Control does a pretty good job of integrating those features into one view.
As for Launchpad, it is quite nice to have your apps organised the same way that they are on your iPhone or iPad. I just don’t think I will get much use out of it personally.
And that is where I will leave things, otherwise this post will turn into an annoying review!