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Crash4419
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Like you, after my initial Tiger installation, I stepped away from the community and this past summer decided to set up a Leopard box. A lot has indeed changed! From my limited understanding of it (I may have some of this wrong) and in summary:

  • The advantage of a vanilla install is that in theory you can just download updates directly from the source without any changes, freeing you from the wait cycle involved while someone fixes any compatabilities. In practice, some minor intervention is sometimes required to insure that some of the major updates don't toast your system. People are pretty good at reporting their experiences with updates on these pages. For example, with 10.5.5, where a script needed to be run in terminal to automatically remove an installed file that caused a kernel panic and prematurely ended the upgrade.
  • Boot123 is mainly for the initial installation. It's is a linux bootloader that you prepare (or dl prepared) will the essential drivers for your system so that you can launch the leo install from an original leo install dvd. If your system is close enough in spec to an intel mac, you're on your way to having a vanilla install for osx. Every time you boot though you need to boot with Boot123 first. Which is why:
  • EFI (came first) and Chameleon (an evolution of EFI, which solves some EFI issues) allow the osx you install to think that the original mac firmware is on your system and boots Darwin for you, so you don't need Boot123 anymore. A hardware version also exists in the form of "EFIX" which is expensive but it's an independantly developed solution that will also handle much of the fiddling involved in adapting some of the more involved new leo upgrades and updates for you. Note that "EFI" stands for Extensible Firmware Interface which is an evolution of a pc's BIOS used in macs. So the "EFI" software referred to is in fact a software layer emulating the "EFI" firmware.
  • This part I'm not 100% clear on, but this is my understanding: with EFI/Chameleon, it also becomes possible to introduce identification strings into one of the system boot files (EFIStudio can be used for that) to identify hardware to the system so that it can use native drivers or point to alien drivers. In the past people have used "Injectors", intermediate software that connects the system tree to the drivers. Using EFI strings, these injectors become obsolete. This is seems to be work in progress: it worked for me with graphics, but not for audio. YMMV.

And that's the big bits :)

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  • 7 months later...

Well Boot123 is interresting because it let's you load the patched kernel and kext's you need before loading, meaning that you can run an unmodified leopard install and update as if it were original, this method has also been made to work from the hidden EFI partition on GUID Partitioned disks so taht you don't need the CD

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