iATKOS S3 10.6 on Samsung R700 - success!

[voodoor]

I have now got OSX86 Snow Leopard running nicely on my Samsung R700 notebook / laptop thanks to iATKOS S3 v2 so I wanted to share my findings so far and see if anyone can help me get the GeForce 8600M GT, 3954ABG wifi and Marvell 88E8055 ethernet to work? I'm running the 10SR BIOS with 4GB RAM and a 64GB OCZ Agility4 SSD but I'd expect iATKOS S3v2 with the config listed below will work just as well with 1/2GB RAM and a regular HD too.

 

The touchpad and keyboard work, sound works, SD card slot and the DVD drive are all fine. The laptop display is only running at 1024x768 currently but at least its displaying an image, which it failed to do under Leopard-based OSX86 distros. I'm not going to bother trying to get the full res (1440x900) activated until I've got a proper, working GPU kext. Neither of the NV enablers included with iATKOS S3 did anything to improve the QE/GL/res support - in fact NVEnabler causes real display trouble on the R700 and I would advise not to bother installing the included Natit NV enabler either.

 

When choosing the installer customization options, I use all the defaults but I choose the following kexts in addition:

 

Intel SATA/IDE

Voodoo PS/2 (Touchpad doesn't work with Apple PS/2 kext)

Battery

Card reader

NTFS-3G

 

That's it!

 

I've got it dual-booting with KXStudio 12.04.3 amd64 so I'm greatly impressed already, even without QE/GL or networking!

 

I've not started on trying to get wifi/eth working yet but I've had a bit of a read into the GPU. Apparently the NVkush.kext should be able to get QE/GL working with the R700's 8600M but I may have to run in 32bit mode? I've already tried this kext:

 

http://www.mediafire.com/download/y1jzemjmdmv/SilentNatit.kext.x86_64.zip

 

but it didn't work.

[voodoor]

I'm happy to confirm that the R700's integrated webcam works (with the photo booth app) as does 1440x900.

 

I've not put any more effort into trying to get QE/GL working but I have looked into the networking probs a bit more. According to the 10.6 OSX86 HCL, the Marvell 88E8055 should work OOTB. In fact its one of the very few compatible NICs they list but it doesn't appear to be working for me. I've not actually tested ethernet yet but I don't see anything listed under the ethernet section of device profiler or in the networking set up tool.

 

There is a WIP driver for the i3945ABG but it doesn't support encryption (if you can get it to work at all and it doesn't sound too stable) so I don't think I'll bother with that.

 

To get iATKOS to boot at the R700's native screen res, run:

sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

Change the 'Quiet boot' option to 'Yes' and add these lines:

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1440x900x32</string>

Save, reboot! If you get the 'power button of doom' error message after altering the Boot.plist you may need to boot the iATKOS install disc and run Disk Utility's Repair function on your OSX system drive.

I thought I'd add a few notes for those who want to multiboot OSX with Linux, even though I'm sure this will have been covered on these forums before.

 

Before you install OSX86, you'll want to make sure you have a bootable (CD or USB) copy of Super Grub2 Disk. SG2D is included on system rescue cd (via its floppy tools sub-menu) so I'd recommend obtaining that instead as it includes so much more.

 

http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage

 

Installing OSX86 will overwrite your GRUB MBR but it is easy to boot back into your Linux install by booting SG2D, which will detect and let you boot whatever OS's it detects.

 

Once your back in Linux, do the following to re-install GRUB complete with a new entry for OSX86.

Lets say OSX is installed on /dev/sda2. If you haven't done so already you will need to change the permissions on the grub.cfg file so that you can edit it by hand and save changes:

sudo chmod 777 /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Open grub.cfg in a text editor:
 

sudo nano /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Replace whatever the Ubuntu/ GRUB 2 installer added to grub.cfg with
an entry like this:
 

menuentry "Mac OS X (on /dev/sda2)" {
        insmod hfsplus
        set root=(hd0,2)
        multiboot /boot
}

Then run the grub-installer to apply the changes:

sudo grub-install /dev/sda