Toshiba Satellite L40-17T, meet the Max OS X

[LeXa2]

Good day to all.

 

My OSx86 experience was mostly based on getting it to work reasonably well inside VirtualBOX VM on AMD CPU equipped host. Basically it meant that the biggest problem to face is wrong CPUID so the solution was to use patched xnu kernel (legacy_kernel). There were no chances to get CI/QE working (no drivers exists yet for this; it had been published on forums that VBox team is working on it, but there hadn't been any released stuff so far), and the patched AC97 sound driver worked badly with no solution to fix this available.

 

Now I had been asked to install OS X 10.6 on Toshiba Satellite L40-17T notebook. I had used nawcom's modCD 0.3 to boot into Mac OS X 10.6.3 install media that in my case was USB stick drive containing the copy of original Install DVD. Unfortunately it looks like that nawcom's modCD 0.3 wasn't designed to auto-patch Snow Leopard Installer launched from USB stick (while it succeeds with it when running installer from DVD media), so I had ended up with vanilla Mac OS X install.

 

Well, no problems with it. I had used modCD ones again to boot into freshly installed system, installed Chameleon 2 RC4 into mbr and bootsector of the System GUID partiton and tried to reboot. Chameleon popped up offering me to boot into my Mac OS X install, but all I got when tried to proceed was black screen.

 

I thought that this was due to Celeron D CPU this laptop was equipped hadn't been ever installed in original Mac OS X hardware so I need to install and use patched kernel in order to get this system to boot. Omitting the excess details I was finally able to boot into the installed system after installation of the legacy_kernel and fakesmc.kext.

 

New problem I've been facing was keyboard and mouse not working. It again took a lot of time to found and install the correct versions of PS/2 supporting kexts, but in the end I had done the things right was finally able to use built-in keyboard and synaptic touchpad instead of external USB mouse and keyboard. Key point here was to find fresh-enough version of VoodooPS2, containing not only VoodooPS2Keyboard and VoodooPS2Mouse, but also VoodooPS2Touchpad inside VoodooPS2Controlller.kext Plugins folder.

 

Then I had been forced to install crappy Realtek USB Wireless drivers for Mac OS X 10.5 in order to get laptop built-in USB wireless working. It is based on Realtek 8198 USB chip so I had to fiddle with Device ID in kext to make it work (details here: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=193561# ).

 

Last thing I had installed was VoodooHDA v.2.7.1 that enabled the sound output.

 

Intel GMA videocard is working out of the box, no tweaks needed.

 

So, what should I do next?

 

It is obvious that there are a lot of fixes to apply to make this laptop work good under OS X. What I don't like at the moment is:

 

a) No battery icon displayed at the top panel. Looks like the system was unable to detect the battery due to messy DSDT/ACPI. What should I do? Is it "fixable" by DSDT patching or should I install some kexts instead?

 

It is unclear if the system use any energy-saving technologies this notebook is capable of. I know that Celeron 540 was based on the Core 2 architecture but lacks SpeedStep support. Still it may use enhanced halt states when idle. How to check if OS X use this states? If not - what should I do to enable it? Should I again resort to patching DSDT or not?

 

c) Sending this note into "sleep" mode leads to the black screen with eventual hang. How to debug this? Are there any methods known to make sleep mode work? Is it the DSDT patching again or something easier like installing kexts?

 

d) Problems with the VoodooHDA microphone support. Looks like that any signal going in mic port gets amplified and output to the laptop speakers resulting in huge feedback and inability to use the mic. How to debug this? Are there any ways to make vanilla Apple HDA driver to recognize and use laptop's built-in sound device? Or should I tweak VoodooHDA somehow to make this "input monitoring" disappear?

 

Thanks in advance for any help with solving the above problems.

I will post additional info here if I would manage to fix some of the above myself.

[LeXa2]

Ping! Toshiba owners (and other hackintosh laptop users with the configuration similar to the one this Satellite L40-17T laptop has: Intel Celeron 540, 1Gb DDR2 RAM, Intel® GMA X3100 Video, Intel chipset, e.t.c.), how had you been dealing with the above mentioned problems?