Sonyintosh – My experience with OSx86 on my Vaio VGN-C1Z

So everyone has been banging on about how great Macs are for a while now. I’m not convinced, the little time I’ve had using them I’ve found the OS annoying to work on. Now, I’m happy to admit it’s because I haven’t given it a chance, and the reason for that is I don’t have a spare grand to shell out for my own one.

Recently I’ve been feeling the need to try out some iPhone development. (I don’t even own one, yet) This proves particularly difficult under Window so I started looking at Mac hardware. As lovely as it is, I can’t bring myself to spend the cash on one without a purpose for doing so when I can do almost everything I need to under XP/Ubuntu. Then I came across the Hackintosh community who have documented alot of their experiences while attempting to install Mac OS X on various types of hardware with varying degrees of success.

So this brings me to my experience with it. Thankfully the community has taken the sting out of getting the majority of components for my laptop working. Hazza!

So here’s a step-by-step guide for getting OSX installed on a Sony Vaio VGN-C1Z/B Laptop. This has the following specs which might help people looking at this with a differnet model laptop which has the same hardware. Specification Link

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub [8086:27a0] (rev 03)

00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port [8086:27a1] (rev 03)

00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller [8086:27d8] (rev 02)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:27d0] (rev 02)

00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:27d2] (rev 02)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 [8086:27d4] (rev 02)

00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 [8086:27d6] (rev 02)

00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:27c8] (rev 02)

00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:27c9] (rev 02)

00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:27ca] (rev 02)

00:1d.3 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:27cb] (rev 02)

00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller [8086:27cc] (rev 02)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev e2)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge [8086:27b9] (rev 02)

00:1f.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller [8086:27df] (rev 02)

00:1f.2 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller [8086:27c4] (rev 02)

00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller [8086:27da] (rev 02)

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation G72M [GeForce Go 7400] [10de:01d8] (rev a1)

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller [11ab:4351] (rev 13)

06:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection [8086:4222] (rev 02)

0a:03.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller [104c:8039]

0a:03.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller [104c:803a]

0a:03.2 Mass storage controller [0180]: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD) [104c:803b]

Find an ISO of Mac OS X and burn it to DVD. I used ideneb 10.5.6 for this laptop. I tried others and had problems getting though even the basic installation with them so I stopped when I found one that worked without a problem. Other ones may well be better but as I’m only doing this to see if I can cope with Mac OS before purchasing a machine then I just want functional for now.

Partition your hard drive. I have currently wiped everything from the HD in this laptop, except the recovery partition. I used GParted ISO which can be downloaded here. I created a 25Gb partition formatted in hfs+ as I intend on bringing windows/ubuntu back onto the disc in the future. Be sure to label this new partition as a bootable one otherwise you’ll have problems after you install Mac OS.

Boot from the DVD you burnt in step 1 and allow the system to boot into the installer software. You hopefully shouldn’t need any parameters, launch it with -v however for your first time incase something does go wrong then you’ll have a better chance of finding the problem.

Once into the GUI installer you need to launch the Disk Utility program. You’ll see your disc on the left and hopefully two partitions underneath it. a ~8Gb partition as disk0s01 which is your recovery one and disk0s02 which will be the partition you created in GParted. Select disk0s02 and then click the erase tab. Select Mac os extended as the filesystem type. Label the drive, mines is MacOSx, and then click Erase. Once this is complete you should see the partition go from greyed out to black on the left. This means you have a partition which can be installed to now.. hurra! Close the disk utility program.

Now your back to the installation GUI. Click continue until you can pick the partition we sorted in step 4. Select that disc and click continue. You should now have the option to customize the installation. Click customize. (I’ve not had a chance to play with the most optimal setup at this stage. This is only a doc of what worked for me. If you know a better way, fire it in comments and I’ll try and update the post) I install the following extras over the defaults.

Tools->OSx86Tools

Uhh I can’t remember the other ones now, but I’m sure this is pretty much all you need.

Now start the installation and wait for a bit, make tea, cheese on toast, knock one out, whatever works for you.

So it’s installed now without a hitch, you’ve put in your username and you now at a Mac Desktop.. WOOP you think! until you realise nothing is as it should be. No network, wifi, sound and the gfx are slow and clunky (not to mention a 1024×768 resolution on your lovely 1440×900 screen) Not to worry these are all sortable fortunatly due to the hard work of many people which we’ve tapped into here through the wonders of google!

The first thing you want is networking as this will make the rest much easier. Now firstly I got the wired ethernet port going. To do this we need to modify the Info.plist of one of the drivers. I’ll go through the full process rather than just telling you what to change as it will help for other people new to this. Firstly we need to look at the hardware we have using the lspci out (see above). From this we can see our ethernet controller.

02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller [11ab:4351] (rev 13)

Fortunately, there is already a Mac driver for a similar ethernet controller, and even more fortunate is the fact that it works without any need for modification to the driver itself. All we need to do is tell the OS that the driver works on our hardware as well as the hardware found in the Mac hardware range. Run this (you can use your editor of choice)

sudo vi /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleYukon2.kext/Contents/Info.plist

Search for 436211ab and it should take you to a section of XML starting with the key “Yukon-88E8052″ Now I just replaced the entries for this section, however I think you could probably copy this key and dict tags and make your own entry should you wish to keep the original. Anyway, you need to edit the Key so it now says

<key>Yukon-88E8036</key>

Then withing the dict tag there should be a key called “IOPCIPrimaryMatch” and the string is “0×436211ab” modify this to be

<string>0×435111ab</string>

For your reference, this value is taken from the lspci output “[11ab:4351]” The first number is the manufacturer code and the second is the hardware identifier code.

The next step is to redo the extensions details. I’m not entirely sure if all these steps are required. I’ll update when I know for sure, but do this anyway.

sudo rm -f /System/Library/Extensions.mkext

sudo rm -f /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache

sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

sudo kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions

sudo reboot

Now once the machine restarts, you should now beable to find your wired ethernet controller in the network utility and if you are running DHCP on your network that should be you good to go.

TODO: Wireless drivers

Graphics Drivers. OK this is the most annoying part about this experience. It 

Audio drivers are pretty simple once your up and running on the network. All you need is AppleHDAPatcher v1.20 and a codec dump of the ALC262 hardware. Fortunatly I have provided both here! This should get the speakers and headphones working.

Download  AppleHDAPatcherv1.20.zip file to the mac, unzip the binary to the desktop. Download alc262.txt to the desktop also. Then just drag the txt file onto the binary and away it goes. Reboot and your sorted.