45 replies to this topic

[Rammjet]

Background

Member modbin created a Live DVD that worked on his system using OSX 10.4.8 and the 8.8.1 kernel. He posted instructions (Part 1 and Part 2 and Files). However, not many people tested this nor provided feedback with any problems running a Live DVD on their own systems.

Some people just wanted the Live DVD posted. But the Live DVD is based on creating a real OSX installation just like what you want your custom Live DVD to look like. Then the Live DVD is created from that installation.  Customizing the Live DVD afterward is not so straightforward.

I looked at his instructions and decided that an installer script could be created to perform the same steps.  This would save potential users much of the hardship of creating the Live DVD. Instead, the user would create an OSX partition configured to look like his Live DVD. Then he would run the installer and the Live DVD would be created for him.

I have worked closely with modbin to make sure the installer follows the instructions that he set forward for creating the Live DVD.

Beta Test

This is a beta test of both the Live DVD and the installer that makes it.  The Live DVD that is produced sometimes works differently on my (Intel) system than it does on modbin's (AMD) system. So, more feedback is needed in order to sort out how to make the Live DVD work with all (or most) systems.

What You Do

• Create a new partition with OSX 10.4.8 and 8.8.1 kernel. Configure it as you would like your Live DVD to be. Make sure it is smaller than the size of a DVD since that is what it must fit on.
  
  To install 10.4.8 on your partition, it is best to follow the Pastebin or Paulicat methods.
  
  As a minimum, install 10.4.6 or 10.4.7 and get it functioning. Then install the Apple 10.4.8 Combo update. Before reboot, be sure to install the 8.8.1 kernel. And install the Paulicat AppleSMBIOS.kext. After reboot, configure your installation as you would like your Live DVD to be.
  
  10.4.8 and 8.8.1 kernel resources can be found here.
  
  
  
• Download the Live DVD installer: v1.2 (3/13/2007) - also here.
  (Previous installer: v1.1 (3/10/2007))
  (Previous installer: v1.0 (2/27/2007))
  
  
  
• Run the installer, you will choose a folder to save the Live DVD ISO in.

  NOTE: The ISO must not be saved on the same partition as your Live DVD OSX installation. This is because the installer uses the Disk Utility Restore function which will try to save the ISO into the ISO and it just won't fit. Besides this being a circular problem. You must save the ISO on a different partition from the Live DVD OSX installation. The different partititon should be an OSX (HFS+) partition for best results.
  

  After choosing the folder, you are warned that the next 2 operations will be taking up to 10 minutes to perform. You should be patient for this. During this time, a blank ISO image is being created. And the OSX installation is being copied (restored) to the ISO image.
  
  Following those 2 lengthy operations, some files are rearranged and permissions are repaired.
  
  When the installer is done, it will open the Live DVD folder and show you the finished Live DVD ISO (DMG).
  
  
  
• Burn the ISO (DMG) to a DVD. Simplest way is to open Disk Utility and click on the Burn icon in the toolbar. Select the Live DVD ISO and insert a blank DVD. Click Burn.
  
  
  
• Boot the burned Live DVD. The first step is to press "any key" to start the Live DVD. Otherwise, the countdown will finish and your active partition will boot instead.
  
  The next step is to type in a size for a RAM disk. Minimum size is 30 (MB). If you have 1 GB of RAM, try 60 and if you have 2 GB of RAM, try 120.
  
  Watch the verbose messages for errors during boot. Unfortunately, booting is rather slow.
  
  
  
• If you get booted to the Desktop, try out various features of your Live DVD. The first time you access something after boot, it will be slow. The second and subsequent times will be faster.
  
  
  
• Report any errors/problems encountered during install, during boot or after reaching the Desktop.

Installer Known Problems

• The progress bars may disappear prematurely. This will not affect the performance of the installer, it will just leave you with reduced feedback. In the worst case and all progress bars fail, you will know that the installer is done when it shows you the finished Live DVD ISO. The whole Phase 2 process should take 10-15 minutes depending upon your computer.
  
  The progress bars are displayed using a program called CocoaDialog. This is recommended by many developers including Apple. I have found it to be rather finicky and will throw up errors at random times.  Running it 10 times in a row, it may break 3 times under the same conditions. Unfortunately, short of learning Cocoa, this is the best available solution.

[Hagar]

Hmm I may have to try  this out.. thanks rammjet..

I guess the main object of a live dvd is to test out the OS on different computers, so some way of adding as universal a kextcache as possible might be the next step.

This does look really promising, though

[munky]

Good work, my friend!  I was wondering when someone was going to make a real go of the whole live DVD thing.  Kudos!

[BlackCH]

I tested. It definitely works!! There are a couple differences between the DVD I did by myself (following modbin guide) and the one generated by this app: with the last, the booting time is longer, and it doesnt load all the system preferences (dock position&content, desktop background, etc) automatically. Maybe this toghether with an universal kext cache could be optional settings for the LiveDVD app.

Great job!!


EDIT: I just knew form modbin that the preferences issue is related with an 'HDID: attach failed- timeout' error I had during the boot....

Edited by blackchungo, 27 February 2007 - 08:09 PM.

[Abysmal]

I'll have to try when time permits.. sounds really cool though..

[Atsushi]

Hi Rammjet and everybody,

Live DVD app works perfectly and a 10.4.8 Live DVD also works perfectly!!
I tried Modbin method though I failed many times.
 Picture1.png   459.91K   552 downloads

Rammjet,
Thank you for your great job!!
Atsushi

[Rammjet]

Hagar, on Feb 27 2007, 09:14 AM, said:

I guess the main object of a live dvd is to test out the OS on different computers, so some way of adding as universal a kextcache as possible might be the next step.

An attempt is made to make the kextcache compatible with most PC's.

The kextcache in a normal OSX installation only contains info from the kexts actually used by that installation. The kextcache placed on the Live DVD is built by the installer for the Live DVD by using all of the i386-capable kexts found in the OSX installation. In addition, during the first phase of the installation, one of the kexts that is inserted is the IOATAFamily.kext taken from one of the OSX install DVD's.

Unfortunately, most Hackintoshes require a lot of tweaking to get them to work with OSX. Until someone creates ultimate kexts that can be dropped into an installation to enable audio, video, disk access, etc without any further tweaking, the Live DVD will suffer the same problems when tested on different systems.

[jotokun]

It isnt working for me. I started off with 10.4.6, upgraded to 10.4.8, customized it, ran the utility. Things looked fine, but when I would load teh cd, it would get to the bootloader and say somehting was missing. However, I am not going to say what is missing because I belive that it was caused by something else. I tried making more ISOs and had teh same thing. Then I knoticed that all my isos were 384MB in size. Specs in sig

[giii]

jotokun, on Mar 5 2007, 11:54 PM, said:

It isnt working for me. I started off with 10.4.6, upgraded to 10.4.8, customized it, ran the utility. Things looked fine, but when I would load teh cd, it would get to the bootloader and say somehting was missing. However, I am not going to say what is missing because I belive that it was caused by something else. I tried making more ISOs and had teh same thing. Then I knoticed that all my isos were 384MB in size. Specs in sig

You wouldn't happen to be saving your ISO to a fat32 partition? The error wouldn't happen to be "missing com.apple.boot.plist"?
I did the same thing and had the same result.

[jotokun]

I changed my partition type to HFS+, reinstalled, and everything... just worked! Boot up time is over an hour, and the first time you do anyting is slow, but then it speeds up. After it boots and you play around with it for a bit, its hard to tell that this is comming off of a DVD drive. And I can play Quake with software rendering at full speed! I consider that a major achivement. My only critisism with operation is that I cant get NeoOffice to work properly, and it worked just fine on my HD.

[REVENGE]

This stuff is amazing.  Nice job Rammjet!

[xtraa]

Rammjet, on Feb 28 2007, 04:28 PM, said:

An attempt is made to make the kextcache compatible with most PC's.

The kextcache in a normal OSX installation only contains info from the kexts actually used by that installation. The kextcache placed on the Live DVD is built by the installer for the Live DVD by using all of the i386-capable kexts found in the OSX installation. In addition, during the first phase of the installation, one of the kexts that is inserted is the IOATAFamily.kext taken from one of the OSX install DVD's.

REALLY amazing job, Rammjet  

Where can we donate?

In every case, I would suggest, to make the iso a readwrite image. (Or maybe it actually is?) Then we would only
need a script that 'hdiutil attach -readwrite' the image and do a kextcache of the extensions folder, and finally cp the
mkext over to the DVD. RW images would be still bootable.

And with the kext-cmpatibility: I think there are options to set wildcards in the dev and ven IDs, so that a range of
devices is picked but without getting a panic. Ther was a document at the ADC site somewhere about the exact
formats.

Edited by xtraa, 08 March 2007 - 07:25 AM.

[Louis Frankland]

Quick very n00bish question,

What happens if you are preparing a live DVD for both AMD and Intel systems?

Do you have to load both kernels as you cant then boot after installation?

[modbin]

seems like we don`t have major errors in the installer   , ok boottime is slow but the installer is beta atm.

jotokun, on Mar 8 2007, 12:46 AM, said:

I changed my partition type to HFS+, reinstalled, and everything... just worked! Boot up time is over an hour, and the first time you do anyting is slow, but then it speeds up. After it boots and you play around with it for a bit, its hard to tell that this is comming off of a DVD drive. And I can play Quake with software rendering at full speed!

boot time should be around 20min with this version. We are working on faster booting, current boot time is around 8-10min.

xtraa, on Mar 8 2007, 08:11 AM, said:

In every case, I would suggest, to make the iso a readwrite image. (Or maybe it actually is?) Then we would only
need a script that 'hdiutil attach -readwrite' the image and do a kextcache of the extensions folder, and finally cp the
mkext over to the DVD. RW images would be still bootable.

The installer already mounts the iso readwrite and does a kextcache of the Extensions folder after inserting some special kexts.

Louis Frankland, on Mar 8 2007, 06:31 PM, said:

Quick very n00bish question,

What happens if you are preparing a live DVD for both AMD and Intel systems?

Do you have to load both kernels as you cant then boot after installation?

Amd kernel also works on Intel, it is just cpuid emulation.

greets,
modbin

[xtraa]

Hi modbin,

thanks for the reply

Ok, my AMD SSE3 nForce boots up in 10 minutes from the LiveDVD now.

It has a few rescue apps on it and I managed to drop the overall size to 2.3 GB.

The reason why I was asking for a post-script that injects an extensions folder
is that I want to make a rescue CD for Tiger and share it. A postscript injection
could provide an option to personalize such a DVD with the own Extensions.

ATM, the DVD here has a packed size of 800 MB, including all standard apps plus some
more, like iBackup, CCC and stuff. But I am working on excluding some more things.
My goal is to drop the image size to about 600 MB what would be convenient for
sharing.  

Also I am about to provide maximum compatibility. That means Vesa only, and all
patches around applied.

For research, I used the Tiger 911 DVD from the One-Byte Wonder as a sample.
TWBW used almost the same RC Script that you used but sadly this DVD is for PPC only.

There was another PPC live DVD and I am going to tinker around with the directories
and delete them one by one, until they have nearly the same content - except that we
have X86 binaries of course

Anyway thanks to you and rammjet for your great effort! I think this is a long awaited
tool that will make some people very happy.

Edited by xtraa, 09 March 2007 - 05:26 AM.

[Rammjet]

The iso (dmg) created by the installer can be mounted read/write.

If you want the Live DVD to have a kextcache with a certain set of extensions, just put those extensions into the Extensions folder on the partition you use to create the Live DVD from. When the installer creates the kextcache for the Live DVD, your extensions will be included.

If making OSX compatible with most Hackintoshes was as simple as providing a range of vendor/device id's in the various kexts, we would have OSX install DVD's that install a version of OSX that works out of the box with most Hackintoshes. But it hasn't been that simple. When the Hackintosh community develops a set of kexts that allow OSX to work with most machines without further modification, those kexts can be included in a general purpose Live DVD. Targeting reduced functionality (such as VESA-only video) to increase compatibility does make the task easier.

I will be posting version 1.1 of the installer that creates a Live DVD with a faster boot time than the current 1.0 installer.

[jotokun]

Boot time is 15 minuts 7 seconds. Specs in sig

Only issues I encountered is shortly after the OS makes the transition from terminal to Aqua, it switches back to terminal with nothing on the screen. It hangs for a few minuts and goes back.

[Erhnam]

Very interesting project! I'm able to help or share bandwidth (ftp). Another suggestion. Try using a USB drive with 1.0 or 2.0 GB. It will allow us to make changes on the fly!! See:

http://blog.bradberg...-a-flash-drive/

[xtraa]

Hi,

I have some suggestions for a unified Live DVD, some aren't new but helpful.

To shrink the Installation, you can set the partition to the standard DVD size, because if we have free space there, it will .zip to zero, but it still let the possibility open, to add programs and tools. So it don't make sense to shrink the partition, to 3.x GB.

To reduce the content, first uncheck everything at setup, all printer drivers and extra fonts etc., we dont need them anyway. I then asked myself, ok, what does one really need on a Live DVD. So Spotlight, Adressbook, iCal, QT, Mail, iTunes and DVDPlayer etc. can be wiped away.

Then I ran a freeware named Monolingual. It not only kills all language files (except english of course) it also does the AppZapper Job. That gave me another 1GB free space.

After deleting some more folders like reciepts, sounds, pictures and stuff, I was able to shrink the content on the DVD to 700MB. Still with working web, scripts and safari. I also left the dashboard untouched.

Now if you pack it, it will zip the free space to zero, so that you end up with a comftable packagesize of about 600MB that would make it sharing friendly.

Because one would share such a live DVD as a readwritable .dmg, it would be very easy for anyone to add favorite programs to the image before burning it to disk.

My suggestion to get it running on most systems would be, that we all could make a kextstat and post the outcome here together with our system specs. That way, we could make sure, not to forget a kext. Another thing I did not tested yet is if an AMD patched DVD would run on an Intel, too...