Successful Installation of Kalyway 10.5.2 and update to 10.5.5

[asc3nti0n]

Right, so lets assume that I have done this before... nine times before. I'll document the full process that I'm going through this time, hoping to point out some glaringly obvious mistake that means that I can actually update all the way to 10.5.5.

 

So look on the Intehweb and download the Kalyway 10.5.2 Install DVD and the Apple 10.5.5 Combo Update.

 

So I need to get to at least 10.5.3, SPORE is the new game by the people have brought us The Sims... and while the Sims sucked hard, Spore is a game that appeals to every budding scientist in us. I've only clocked it once under XP, now I'm running MOSX.

 

So that's my motivation here, My problems that I have seen in my past nine installs I said in my first blog that I would post about here... but i'll put that off one more post as I've started this installation and i'll start forgetting steps if I don't move into the installation documentation.

 

So where did I start? Well I have four installed Hard Drives, two are completely empty that I can play with them as I see fit.

* Western Digital 300GB Velocitraptor 10,000RPM and 16MiB of cache

* Seagate 400GB 7200.11 AS 7200PRM also with 16MiB of cache

So booting onto the Kalyway 10.5.2 Install DVD I select Disk Utility in the Utilities window on the menu bar, on each drive I partition them with two pieces each.

 

In theory I need a Windows XP installation, so have the front 100GB piece of the slow drive set aside unformatted.

The rear 272.27GB piece of the slow drive, I have formatted as Mac OS X (HFS+ Journalled). This will be my Time Machine partition, so I called it "TimeMachine" not adding spaces in my hard-drive names. A side note; as yet I have been unable to successfully restore from the Time Machine, but I'll stick to taking backups and current versions just incase it comes useful in the future.

The front piece of the Raptor I have set aside 100GB for Mac OS X (HFS+ Journalled). That'll be called MacOSx86.

The second piece of the raptor I have made 102GB long, just larger than the front piece, Mac OS X HFS+ Journalled. I'm calling that BupOSx86. Disk Utility can "restore" a partition (or image file) to another partition. So i'll be imaging the MacOSx86 to BupOSx86 when I make it right.

And the third piece of the Raptor I have formatted as FAT32 and called "Universal" so that incase I need to save something from the Windows Installation and then pull out Hard Drives, I don't know, anyhow, FAT32 is the most "universal" Hard Drive format available to me, so that's it.

 

Now, back to Kalyway Installation. OK, the Customization. Aside from the Default selection, I think all I selected was a Vanilla Kernel, the Video Card Driver I selected NVInject_512 for my 512MiB graphics card, for Network everything left Default, but this is the darkest art of my installation, meaning I really don't know what is running my Ethernet ports... uhm, this is all from memory see, SMBIOS I selected one that says is DDR3 1333... I'm still not sure what this helps with... then just tick "Thirds" which installs a full suite of third-party applications into the KOOLSOFTS folder, some useful, some extremely useful, some I still have no idea what are. And the Time-Machine fix, without ticking that, Time Machine doesn't work, and trying to install it later, it breaks my Ethernet.

 

So with those general idea for selections, Go, and wander off to grab a bite to eat, a cuppa tea, 15 minutes of powernap, and it should boot into that funky funky OS X start music. Fill in the Apple ID (its the iTunes Music Store username and password for me) and fill in the rest of the information.

 

So now we're in a nice new installation. Check that Safari can see the internet? For me Internet is an ADSL router throwing out DCHP IPs over a gigabit home network, so I always have internet turned on, which is why the Apple ID worked five minutes ago at first boot time.. So yes, I have internet so I point the Time Machine to the backup drive, and take a backup. Hope you haven't finished that cuppa yet, as this first backup also takes a while, go find a bikkie (biscuit for those not up with aussie slang) to go with it.

 

Maybe a quick sidetrack, if you're worried about your internet bandwidth and/or cap... jump into System Preferences quick and turn off Software Update, it'll auto-download the Combo Update otherwise which we won't be installing from there, and that's 600MiB wasted, on the contrary, the other updates in there we will be downloading from software update and if they auto download then the Time Machine backup still store them for the future install for us... but 600MiB can be expensive for some people. so where were we? Time Machine backup, is it finished yet?

 

Right, we're working and we're backed up. what to do first? Well I first start with the Operating System and GUI settings in System Preferences. Make the desktop picture cycle every 15 minutes, set the Flurry screensaver the way I like it, alter the Energy Saver settings to never sleep the machine and only turn down the monitor after 2.25 hours (the length of the longest movie I have). Set eh dock to auto-hide and magnify. Sharing my screen to the VNC protocol (put in a password), and File Sharing setting the options to SMB and ticking the username for access. Add some folder shares in here too like if you want to access your iTunes Music Folder from another computer at the file level etc.

 

Possibly most important system preference to set is the resolution of the monitor to 1600x1200 at 85Hz... Now, my graphics card has dual DVI connections, my monitor doesn't have any so I use a VGA converter. But the first few installations I had it in one port on the graphics card, and I would get a "blue screen" after altering the graphics card setting... then on a later reinstall I lost the screen completely, no amount of force hard restarts got my screen back... turned out I was on the wrong port on the graphics card... so if you get a blue-screen when altering the screen resolutions, try your other graphics card port.

 

If you've installed all the third-party applications, then Perian should appear in the System Preferences, click that, and it'll ask you for your password, that'll install it, it does something for Dolby Surround Sound... whether it ACTUALLY does or not under my ADI-1988b motherboard sound codec, we'll investigate that in the future, I just wanna keep my networking at the moment.

 

Right, once you've done System Preferences, skip Software Update for the moment, it'll come soon enough.

 

Next I go through some of the more useful third-party applications and update them, and install a few more applications of my own. Install Firefox, iLife'08, Microsoft Office 2008, M$Office will want to do some updates, they're fairly large downloads, so do them as often as you feel like... there can be an issue with it later on which I'll blog later on. Search for and download OSX86Tools; It's a big yes for immensely useful application stakes, run it and pin it into the Dock, I use it that often.. well officially I used it like twice.

So of the Kalyway Installed apps; Adium is the multi-IM Client, that's out-of-date, Growl isn't, but if you go to its website and download it you can get the Extras folder from the .dmg and copy it to the downloads folder... THEN run the GrowlTunes extra... it needs permanent access to the GrowlTunes script there and if you unmount the image you lose it again . Pacifist and VLC also need updates... I think VLC is Kalyway installed, I didn't notice it this past install, never mind, VLC is the best media player no matter what platform you're on, no stuffing around with video codecs on the M$ OS. Search the internet for Carbon Copy Cloner ("CCC") by Bombich software. This is how I'm going to actually make an image that works if/when my Time Machine won't load from the Kalyway Boot CD when I manage to break the OS in a few hours time.

 

Rightio, install and check for updates of other packages in that folder, I do all that should be safe enough to do without breaking the OS/networking... So now restart again. If I still have internet working, then I take another Time Machine backup. I should take ghost images of the drive to really be sure, but I'm just not that serious about this hobby just yet.

 

So once that's done, Run Software Update, untick the 10.5.5 (current at time of writing) Combo Update, we'll need to manually download the standalone Combo Update from Apple website. too bad if it's already downloaded in the background. I wasn't able to successfully extract it from the Packages folder in the Library, it's a .dist not a .dmg or .pkg... google it and you may be able to recover it... So once iTunes is all uptodate, run it and get Genius scanning your library, for me that took 36 hours... I have a lot of tracks, but it's worth it, the new iTunes Genius is BRILLIANT for putting together lists of like songs that rate well with each other. and the moer users out there with ratings for tracks, that better it will become for the rest of us.

 

Once you've gotten all the Software Updates up to date, with only the Combo Update left... and Internet is still working... You guessed it, Time Machine.

 

So, lets bring up OSXTools, don't "Download and Install Hardware Drivers" in OSX86Tools just yet, that's the one that can break things, run the big button at the bottom twice to get the PCI Tools installed so that it will work after a restart, but just don't actually download and install anything just yet. So give her a reboot.

8th.

 

---------- Intermission ---------

I hope you have a month of tunes on the ready... because that was the length of my intermission, it was September 19 since I last saved this text-file, and now its October 8th. My music collection is a bunch more clean thanks to the topic of my last post, and I have XP running in a Parallels Desktop installation, oh, and a Ubuntu in another Parallels. but thats a slightly different topic... a month without playing a game, I'm getting ansi.

 

So. I have gotten 10.5.2 to a point that I've been happy to use it. MOSX is fast, responsive (unless BeaTunes is taking 180% CPU-time) and generally has had a fortnights uptime by the time I get around to thinking that she might like a reboot. based on previous experiance with Time Machine not *actually* being able to recover an entire OS, I'm going to take an image of the drive. CCC is running right now, imaging away to an image on my TimeMachine partition. a Read Only image. Its' going to be painful to create a bootable USB Mac OS X I can see it now, but that will be the first chore once I break the main OS this time. Maybe I should do it now, before I break it. Hmm... Food for thought.

 

Then reboot onto the Kalyway CD so that I can run Disk Utility and clone that MacOSx86 to BupOSx86. I assume it will be faster and work better from the DVD than if I try and do it while it tries to run the system from the source partition.

 

So that's two backups, you can understand that after a months use of the system I have gotten it pretty much that way I like it now.

 

Ok. I found a post on Insanelymac, if I can include the current wording of the main post I will, as an attachment to this post... otherwise I would say the thread will continue, chasing specific answers through the what is currently 77 pages of topic may be hard, and mysticus refuses to answer PM requests for aid, which is a fair call when the post has helped so many, if post your query to the topic, then there may be a dozen people able to answer it, rather than bother one dude. So my link to it is this: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...=109102&hl= (contact me if you want the text from Mysticus C walkthrough Post # 1 of his Complete Updates for Newbies and All -- Currently 10.5.5 Combo (Only Intel CPUs), All future updates will be in the same topic...)

 

OK, so you PM him for the Rapidshare direct link, I used the Archive1.1.4.zip and I get a Pre and Post installer, download the 10.5.5 Combo update from Apple (I think I asked this of you already). I followed all the guides on the post for taking a Copy of my MacOSx86 partition to the BupOSx86, and I didn't even need it. But yeah, I'm dumbfounded, its like so anticlimactic, like I'm trying to use my normal big words but I can't spell them for the life of me.

 

Uhm, so that's it. Thank Mysticus C for closing out what I made an absolute balls up of obviously by not following his walkthrough in the first place. Wow. I planed on spending a whole weekend on it... and I've used 3 hours. and most of that was the hour of backing up the drives. Good Luck.