Pair of Shuttle K45 running SL - thanks Eliade

[gyozadude]

I want to start by thanking Eliade who posted this thread: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=185123 . It gave me the nudge I needed to complete installs on a couple of K45s with SL 10.6.3 and then update them with 10.6.6 combo. [Eliade - I read that your system blew up. If you want a new K45 barebones, new in box, I may have one I'll send to you as a "thank you" for the very informative work you've done for K45 - send me a PM].

 

My path has been somewhat tortuous in getting the install to work. The K45 has a lot of quirks and I cursed OS X many times for the idiosyncratic behaviour. Clearly, Apple didn't make this easy, but it's especially painful, because as a kernel engineer, I deal with device drivers, buses, and device configuration spaces, and to have an OS purposely not see devices makes me almost pull my hair out.

 

My notes to myself include the following:

 

0. Lifehacker is okay for a honking 64-bit MacPro 3,1 system profile. But as a methodology and approach, it didn't work. I'm doing shuttle k45 systems and that installation methodology led to much misunderstanding and confusion. Eliade's instructions were FAR more appropriate. Thanks much!

 

1. Use the USB install route as written by others. The key is to understand that the USB stick is mounted under /Volumes/ directory, and you either restore the Mac OS X install image to the USB first and then do the customization or you customize first then uncheck the 'erase' checkbox in the restore dialog. Trying to install via Optical was an exercise in "waiting for root disk" during boot.

 

2. Search for the location of Chameleon bootloader packages. Should be straightforward to click on the .pkg icon, and then accept the license and then select the USB stick as the target for the install. chicken and egg problem here. You need a Mac system to do the formatting/partitioning/boot loader install. I recommend two systems and a KVM switch to swap between the two as you customize the USB stick. Note - There may be issues of the installer if a terminal is open that has a lock on the resource. The bootloader can't be written to the mounted filesystem. Looks like the installer temporarily unmounts and writes the bootloader, then mounts. Files are copied to the root (/) directory with the USB stick mounted. Tried experimental Chameleon v2, rc5 (b747) and that will boot also. I'm using it now after the install.

 

3. Could not recognize both SATA hard disk and slim SATA DVD burner simultaneously with the USB stick booted and Mac OS X installer running. Saw a brief glimpse of a warning during boot about OSX disabling the other IOATA channel or something like that. Seems like if you plan to install via USB stick to a SATA hard drive, don't hook up the slim DVD burner yet. Do the install first. Try every rational BIOS setting and still didn't work. There may be some dependency on the boot loader here too. The basic bootloader appears to try and front end BIOS as being UEFI so the Mac OS X installer will be able to call into this "shim" layer and think it's accessing EFI. Just my guess. But the bootloader and first kernel load (i.e. /boot ) are likely the stuff of secret sauce that makes the rest of the device tree visible or invisible if done wrong.

 

4. Could NOT recognize the SATA HD when BIOS set to enable 1333 MHz capable CPUs. Had to use defaults which disables 1333MHz capable CPUs. This is a bummer if you have a Core2Duo e6550 and want to enable 7.0x 333MHz, which then runs at 1.86GHz with it turned off, but this allows the disk to be visible. Note, that I could see an IDE hard disk using IDE ribbon cable as the master device and boot/install with 1333MHz CPUs enabled in BIOS. I'm running the latest shuttle BIOS for k45. This was a weird discovery. Use -pure- IDE if you want to run with faster CPUs that support 1333MHz FSB on the k45. Hence I have two systems - one with SATA and Celeron Dual E1400 and the other with IDE and e6550.

 

4a. Note on the IDE slim DVD - these cheap things are nightmares from hell. No jumpers on most to set slave or master, they seem to cause Mac OS X installer to see NOTHING - no drives whatsoever. Tried swapping out the slim-to-regular IDE adapter on the back of slim optical drives with various types. The cheap ones I bought off eBay from China/HKG all had issues. I was able to see IDE slim DVD master/IDE HD slave with the olive green ones that come with some of the slim ITX cases from the higher end case makers. No brand on them. The type of slim DVD drive also seems to make a difference. None of my cheap, APOS81 slim DVD burners would ever work and they were flaky with Linux/Solaris too. A Toshiba slim IDE or Sony slim DVD burner seem to be the ticket. Unfortunately, had to borrow from wife's system. Need to return it to her. Don't need to go into the whole USB slim DVD burner issue as this causes the Digital Rights Management in Mac OS X to kick in and prevent the DVD player from playing by default. VLC and Mplayer get around this so you still have solutions.

 

5. If you follow Eliade's posts and use his posted Kexts and DSDT.aml and smbios.plist and com.Apple.Boot.plist, graphics should just work because he puts flags "arch=i386 -v" as boot options. GMA950 does NOT work in 64-bit system profiler reports no kext loaded if in 64-bit. I also decompiled Eliade's DSDT.aml and he already sets lots of things for us including the gnarly BIOS reset bug that needs a value of 0x02 instead of 0x04, so no need to muck around. Just install it.

 

6. Getting Audio to work required installing AppleHDA.kext from 10.6.2 -and- using the ALC662.kext from 10.6.2. Both must be installed and replace the 10.6.3 versions. Tried removing these from /Extra/Extensions and installed 10.6.6 combo update and no audio. Reverted back to 10.6.2 kexts and it works. So leave them be in /Extra/Extensions. (My colleague likes to install everything in /S/L/E. Here's a reason NOT to do that. I did only the AppleHDA.kext and that caused symbol misalignment and assertion errors during boot (luckily no Kernel Panic) but no audio. Was easier simply to download lastest 2.3.2 kext utility and drag each kext over the utility icon and have it install into /S/L/E.

 

7. Marvell Yukon driver works fine with kexts supplied by Eliade and is stable on even large 7GB rsync transfers and been stressing it for 100GBs of data now. I had some issues earlier because I hacked around and did not strictly follow instructions from Eliade and did some things that were a hybrid of lifehacker and here. Bzzzt. not on the k45. The IONetworkingFamily.kext replacement plus arch=i386 solves many issues.

 

8. I was running temporarily in 64-bit and ran into all sorts of Error 35 __CFGetHostUUID() unable to getString.... blah blah in system.log. This was especially annoying when I run 'sudo' or 'su - root' commands on the shell. I downloaded 2 different versions of UUID.kext and another one. None work on this issue. But booting 32 bit resolves all this.

 

9. After installation and customization completed and bootloader installed, I powered off system, and attached slim SATA DVD burner. Voila, stuck a Stargate Atlantis Season 5, disk 1 into slot, and DVD player pops up and plays! No DRM warnings! And then went to the Apple Menu and clicked on Sleep... and power went from 46 Watts idle to 3 Watts. I clicked the mouse and 8 seconds later, I'm back up to my windowing system. Cool. Power management and Suspend to RAM are working.

 

10. To get the audio to play in Apps by default, you need to not only go into System Prefs app and click on sound and switch the default sound effects output to internal speakers, but click on the second tab for "Output" and click on internal speakers. And yes, for whomever commented somewhere on this forum that VLC is loud, I had the same issue. VLC 1.1.7 was heckaloud! The default audio level on startup was set to 400%! I set that back to 100% in VLC prefs and that made things default much better at startup. Now to figure out how to attach an INTERNAL speaker inside the chassis. I'm thinking of drilling out a bunch of holes on the left side of the chassis cover and attaching a stripped down Altec Lansing im207 speaker. It takes 3 x 1.5V AAA alkaline batteries but works okay with 3 x 1.2V NiMH too. May need to drop 5 volts to 4 volts with zener diode or resistor/zd combo.

 

11. The online software update runs into lots of stall issues. I downloaded the combo-updater for 10.6.6 as one big image (support.apple.com) and applied it locally. Works fine. No real difference between 10.6.3 and 10.6.6 except now I have an App Store icon on the main tool bar and iTunes has a modified logo.

 

12. Note to self: disable the copy files to iTunes Media directory in iTunes Prefs, eats too much disk.

 

Big thanks from an OSX newbie to this forum which has really helped. I've since installed OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Flash, VLC, VPN software, and it all works. It's kind of cool. Thinking about getting the family pack iLife '11 software. Seems incredibly cheap online at $79.