Rugged Leopard tablet PC video

[toorhax]

Thought that you guys might like this...

 

[Skyper]

What are the specs?

[toorhax]

OS: Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.1 Kalyway (vanilla kernel)

Processor: Intel Core Duo Processor U2400 (2MB L2 cache), Processor speed 1.06GHz, 533MHz FSB

Graphics: Intel GM965 integrated video controller (QE and CI hardware accelerated)

Screen: 10.4" 1024 x 768 (XGA) transmissive, daylight-readable TFT Active Matrix Color LCD with Wacom Digitizer

External: video support up to 1280 x 1024 at 16 million colors (24-bit color depth)

Hard Drive: 100GB HDD, shock mounted and removable

Soundcard: SigmaTelTM STAC9751 AC-97 v.2.2 Compliant Audio Codec (currently not working)

Memory: 512MB SDRAM (DDR2), expandable to 4,096MB

Wi-fi: Replaced stock Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG with Apple Airport a/b/g/n PCI-E card

Expansion Slots: PC card type II and ExpressCard/54

Bluetooth: v2.0 + EDR

GPS: NMEA Compliant internal GPS on serial1

 

http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/s...No=Toughbook-19

[Bryan Reagan]

I'm going to be taking a full-time position working for UNAMID in El Fasher, and looking to take a mac, but if I could run Leopard on a ruggedized toughbook that'd be a dream come true! Could you post an install guide? Anything not working?

 

I'd paypal a donation to you for any help you can give. I roll out for training in Dubai in 2-3 weeks.

[toorhax]

Here is a reply I had for a friend of mine that asked the same thing...

Aight. Well before you get too hot and bothered, let me tell you what isn't working:

 

1) Brightness can't be adjusted because the GMA950 driver I have hacked was used in the Mac Mini and not a LCD Laptop. I think I can fix this with a little trouble.

2) The softkeys on the front needs a driver written for it that should be an afternoon project. (HID extension, no biggie.)

3) Screen rotation does not work under OSX.

4) Sound card *should* work, but I haven't had time to edit the driver to see the sound card as a valid chipset.

5) The SD card is not working.

 

What you are loosing compared to your MBP:

 

1) Only runs at 1024x768 due to LCD limitations.

2) No internal camera.

3) Mono speaker that sounds crappy compared to the Apple laptops.

4) Tiny ass keyboard that has some of the keys moved in strange way. (Arrows are weird is the big one.)

5) Firewire works, but it is a 4 pin. So powered 6 pin devices (like iSight cameras) are no-go.

6) Only two USB ports. (I have three on my 17)

7) No internal CD/DVD.

8) 1Ghz processor. You aren't going to compress hours of video on this laptop in this century.

9) You are not going to be able to just run software update on this machine. Updates are manual and a pain right now.

10) Some applications like iMovie are acting weird on my machine. There may be others. Usually these have fixes though. I have lightly tested iPhoto, iWeb, and the iWork suite. I need to test Parallels.

10) Apple can pull support at any second. They are literally allowing us to do this for some strange reason.

11) It is illegal as hell. No question.

 

What you get compared to your MBP:

1) PCMCIA / PCCard I and II

2) NMEA compliant GPS that is marginally good with the internal antenna. (outdoors, full horizon mainly)

3) Convertible tablet

4) Wacom compatible digitizer screen

5) Integrated wireless broadband (not tested)

6) SD card reader (not working currently)

7) Water resistance

8) Daylight visible screen. (This thing is *STUPID* bright.)

9) Three PCI-E card slots for wireless, broadband, whatever.... (Only one tested at this point)

10) Physical switch to turn off wireless. (Untested.)

11) {censored}loads of cheap automobile docking bays and power supplies.

12) You won't look like an Apple tool and can say you are sticking it to the man.

 

So, it is almost a zero-sum game on the cost-benefit.

 

Now for your questions:

 

1) Think of this as a multi-boot linux machine. As long as the OS's can see each other's file systems, then you are good. You could put Windows on a FAT32 partition right beside OSX and be fine. Or do a NTFS and HFS+ partition and then create a third FAT partition for moving things. Then again, if I can get the SD card working, you can just drop a gig SD card in there and use that as the middle man. Note: I am planning on just having 3 separate hard drives. One for each OS. Then use the CF as the middle man if I need to move something from one system to another. (I tend to not do well with multi-boot systems.)

 

2) It is a SATA laptop drive, so I think you cap out at something like 340G these days.

 

I have $4000 in my MBP and I am selling it to someone for $2400 to make this happen. It is a little rough around the edges, but I really like it. Besides, it gives me stuff to hack on when I am sitting on a plane and don't want to work.

 

Lemme know what you think. I wasn't sure if you guys were going to like this or not. After putting hundreds of hours on this, it is a little validating to know that there is at least one other person on the planet that diggs it.

 

Hopefully that fills in a lot of blanks for you. I have been using my Toughbook with OSX on it full time in a production environment for over 8 months now and I love it. 99% stable with only a few quirks.

 

Let me know if you go down this road and I can put together something for you for an install guide. I have this on two Toughbooks at this point and they are all happy little machines.

 

Talk to you soon,

Toorhax

[Rodney Grech]

wow! that made me install OSX onto my CF-18! quick question though, did the keyboard run out of the box or did you have to hack it? same with the trackpad? a walkthrough would be awesome if you did have one written up!

[toorhax]

wow! that made me install OSX onto my CF-18! quick question though, did the keyboard run out of the box or did you have to hack it? same with the trackpad? a walkthrough would be awesome if you did have one written up!

 

When I started this project, it was back in the 10.4.x days. I fought with a CF-18 for a couple weeks and decided that it was too much of a pain in the ass to continue. I had access to a CF-19 and due to the video chipset and Core2Duo, it was *much* closer to Apple's hardware.

 

I do seem to remember that the keyboard and trackpad are off of the PS2 bus and are not USB on the CF18.

 

At this point, with 10.5.x you can install almost any distribution on the CF-19 and be up in no time. I still haven't fixed many of the problems in the earlier post, but I really don't like having sound on my work laptop anyway.

 

Hope that helps!

[indica]

wow! Please let me just say I am very impressed, I have been wanting to play around with osX86 for a while and this made me finally get off my arse!

 

I have a CF-19/F mkii and since seeing this video on youtube I am hellbent on getting this going!

 

Now I have already partitioned the drive up using a iAtkos5i disk, some of the other parts on the box are already installed but bootloader is not having any issues with that part so multi-boot has been successful. Now I have been playing around with any and every pc-friendly leopard distro I could find. hazard and iAtkos to name a few and have been trying to find the right combo to get it to boot up.

 

I tried hazard and could get it to boot up get a blue screen and just as it appears to be bringing up the window mgr, the screen goes south, turning white with vertical lines. no good.

 

I continue to try different combos and am starting to wonder if I am going to need to customize a disk myself to get the video going.

 

now a little background, I am a linux man, working in a windows world, trying to run a mac... Not a whole lot of experience with OSX but I can fumble through it with the best of them. I have been using linux for years, as of the last few mostly gentoo, and consider myself to be fairly competent so I am not scared to get dirty if need be.

 

Any chance you would be willing to help point me in the right direction to get leopard going on my CF-19?

 

Thanks and hope I am not totally hi-jacking your thread! Any help will be appreciated!!

 

Todd

[toorhax]

wow! Please let me just say I am very impressed, I have been wanting to play around with osX86 for a while and this made me finally get off my arse!

 

I have a CF-19/F mkii and since seeing this video on youtube I am hellbent on getting this going!

 

Now I have already partitioned the drive up using a iAtkos5i disk, some of the other parts on the box are already installed but bootloader is not having any issues with that part so multi-boot has been successful. Now I have been playing around with any and every pc-friendly leopard distro I could find. hazard and iAtkos to name a few and have been trying to find the right combo to get it to boot up.

 

I tried hazard and could get it to boot up get a blue screen and just as it appears to be bringing up the window mgr, the screen goes south, turning white with vertical lines. no good.

 

I continue to try different combos and am starting to wonder if I am going to need to customize a disk myself to get the video going.

 

now a little background, I am a linux man, working in a windows world, trying to run a mac... Not a whole lot of experience with OSX but I can fumble through it with the best of them. I have been using linux for years, as of the last few mostly gentoo, and consider myself to be fairly competent so I am not scared to get dirty if need be.

 

Any chance you would be willing to help point me in the right direction to get leopard going on my CF-19?

 

Thanks and hope I am not totally hi-jacking your thread! Any help will be appreciated!!

 

Todd

 

Todd,

 

The system is currently a 10.5.4 system. I have been too lazy to go through the updates honestly. As I recall, I think this is a iAtkos install.

 

I put the factory Panasonic Windows XP Tablet Edition Restore CD in the drive and rebooted. When it asked if I wanted to partition the drive I said "yes". It will then ask for the size of the first partition. I made this one my Windows partition. The second one is the Leopard partition. Let XP have its way with the machine and get it up and running.

 

Then I did the iAtkos install. I don't think that I even selected any of the options. It was a pretty straight forward install. 10.5.1 required some plist tweaking for the video, but 10.5.4 just worked out of the box. I don't remember having any video driver problems. The GM965 is the exact same chipset that is on the Mac Mini. It is {censored} for hard core 3D stuff, but it does get you QE and CI which is absolutely necessary if you want the system to be stable.

 

Suggestion: Go ahead and max out the memory. Even at 4G, this system isn't a screamer. You will really feel that 1Ghz processor if you don't have a lot of memory for OSX to spread out in.

 

The only thing that is kinda weird about my setup is that I swapped out the Intel a/b/g card with a an Apple a/b/g/n. You need to get the one with the Atheros chipset and not the Broadcom. I originally bought one of the Broadcom chipset cards because they only require two antenna connections. Long story short, it didn't work. (I still don't understand why.) The Atheros requires three antenna connections. Luckily the Toughbook has two extra connectors for the cellular modem. So I took one of the cellular antennas and routed it over to the Atheros card and it has been working fine at n speeds for over a year now. Holler if you need help sourcing the Atheros parts or need help installing it. This will require that you pop the bottom of the toughbook and put painters tape on the bottom of the Apple card to keep it from shorting out against the motherboard. It isn't a perfect fit, but I can tell you that I've been beating the {censored} out of my Toughbook in this configuration for over a year and it is still asking for more abuse.

 

Oh, and when you boot back into Windows and it complains that it can't find drivers for the Apple Atheros card, just find a real Apple install DVD and load the driver out of the bootcamp installation. Windows XP will work like a champ from that point on. You can uninstall all of the Intel Wireless {censored} in the control panel.

 

Holler back when you get this far and I can point you at the Waccom drivers and some other stuff that I have working since then. As you might imagine, tablet software is rare and far between.

 

Just to make sure this is worth your time, here are the things that I still don't have working:

1) Sleep and reboot don't work.

2) Brightness is still maxxed out.

3) Rotation doesnt' work. (And that sucks balls because this is so nice to read from in 90' mode.)

4) Sound is not working, but I have spent 0 time on this. I prefer a silent laptop at work.

 

Other than those things, the little laptop is the bomb. I am a software developer and field researcher, so this is my primary machine for 10-20 hours a day depending on my workload. I can honestly say that it is no less stable than my maxxed out MBP that it replaced.

 

Hope this helps. Let me know how you do. I would be very interested if sleep and sound are fixed in later distros. If nothing else, you might be my excuse to reinstall this thing and clean it up a bit.

 

Talk to you soon,

toorhax

[indica]

Todd,

 

The system is currently a 10.5.4 system. I have been too lazy to go through the updates honestly. As I recall, I think this is a iAtkos install.

 

I put the factory Panasonic Windows XP Tablet Edition Restore CD in the drive and rebooted. When it asked if I wanted to partition the drive I said "yes". It will then ask for the size of the first partition. I made this one my Windows partition. The second one is the Leopard partition. Let XP have its way with the machine and get it up and running.

 

Then I did the iAtkos install. I don't think that I even selected any of the options. It was a pretty straight forward install. 10.5.1 required some plist tweaking for the video, but 10.5.4 just worked out of the box. I don't remember having any video driver problems. The GM965 is the exact same chipset that is on the Mac Mini. It is {censored} for hard core 3D stuff, but it does get you QE and CI which is absolutely necessary if you want the system to be stable.

 

Suggestion: Go ahead and max out the memory. Even at 4G, this system isn't a screamer. You will really feel that 1Ghz processor if you don't have a lot of memory for OSX to spread out in.

 

The only thing that is kinda weird about my setup is that I swapped out the Intel a/b/g card with a an Apple a/b/g/n. You need to get the one with the Atheros chipset and not the Broadcom. I originally bought one of the Broadcom chipset cards because they only require two antenna connections. Long story short, it didn't work. (I still don't understand why.) The Atheros requires three antenna connections. Luckily the Toughbook has two extra connectors for the cellular modem. So I took one of the cellular antennas and routed it over to the Atheros card and it has been working fine at n speeds for over a year now. Holler if you need help sourcing the Atheros parts or need help installing it. This will require that you pop the bottom of the toughbook and put painters tape on the bottom of the Apple card to keep it from shorting out against the motherboard. It isn't a perfect fit, but I can tell you that I've been beating the {censored} out of my Toughbook in this configuration for over a year and it is still asking for more abuse.

 

Oh, and when you boot back into Windows and it complains that it can't find drivers for the Apple Atheros card, just find a real Apple install DVD and load the driver out of the bootcamp installation. Windows XP will work like a champ from that point on. You can uninstall all of the Intel Wireless {censored} in the control panel.

 

Holler back when you get this far and I can point you at the Waccom drivers and some other stuff that I have working since then. As you might imagine, tablet software is rare and far between.

 

Just to make sure this is worth your time, here are the things that I still don't have working:

1) Sleep and reboot don't work.

2) Brightness is still maxxed out.

3) Rotation doesnt' work. (And that sucks balls because this is so nice to read from in 90' mode.)

4) Sound is not working, but I have spent 0 time on this. I prefer a silent laptop at work.

 

Other than those things, the little laptop is the bomb. I am a software developer and field researcher, so this is my primary machine for 10-20 hours a day depending on my workload. I can honestly say that it is no less stable than my maxxed out MBP that it replaced.

 

Hope this helps. Let me know how you do. I would be very interested if sleep and sound are fixed in later distros. If nothing else, you might be my excuse to reinstall this thing and clean it up a bit.

 

Talk to you soon,

toorhax

 

Hey toorhax!

 

thx for the quick response! Yeah i have been running through different installs and trying different combos as far as kernels and patches and what not, but to be honest I am not 100% sure what they all are. in all honesty I have not RTFM'd and done my due diligence so my bad...

 

I have had the toughbook for a while when i saw your video, and had a new 320gb drive i have been meaning to put in her for a couple months, saw this as a prime opprotunity to do them both at the same time. she is loaded up now, 4GB of nice mushkin memory and now the new hard drive. It is already partitioned and setup as dual boot, also one part left that I am debating on installing gentoo on, the third has windows 7 and is up and running using the osx boot manager now.

 

For each new attempt at an install I use the disk tool in setup to erase to ensure a clean load as well as still maintain the integrity of the other two partitions.

 

So at this point I am trying to find a distro that installs cleanly and give me working video, i am trying to keep it to as bare bones of an installation as possible assuming I can install all the other packages once the machine is bootable.

 

As far as the shortcomings you mentioned they are all very acceptable for what I use this for, I can always work on getting that stuff going but for now I would just like OSX on this box in any way I can.

 

I do a lot of remote support and this is great to have when hiking and camping and i need to get into one of my servers from the middle of nowhere!!

 

I will post back here once i get something bootable or simply frustrated enough and need some assistance. Again I really appreciate all of you help with this!!

 

Todd

[emacspy]

wow! that made me install OSX onto my CF-18! quick question though, did the keyboard run out of the box or did you have to hack it? same with the trackpad? a walkthrough would be awesome if you did have one written up!

 

i have cf-19 can youhel please

[indica]

Hey toorhax!

 

Just wanted to drop a quick update.

 

Well its been a interesting weekend but i have it up and running, although no wireless or ethernet so its rather limited in as to it's usefulness in it's current state. At this point i have it recognizing the intel card but as i found out in another thread here, its the same problem everyone is having, it just won't associate to an unsecured network. apparently and thankfully updated and working drivers are supposedly forthcoming so i will be watching for them.

 

Have not even tried to install anything for audio but blurtooth and firewire appear to be working. usb is working great and i have plugged a ton of different devices and no issues. no sdcard or dimming of the screen, so no updates for you there. the mouse and keyboard work great, the video i chose during install was x3000 but its showing as no kexts installed in the profiler so not sure whats going on there. the digitizer pen works but is not aligned, seems the movement to too accelerated and am unsure of how to calibrate that in osx so another thing to play around with.

 

I stated off using the iDeneb but also installed iPC and found that to run a little smoother and also at least recognize the intel card. Also ran into some issues with my windows partition so reloaded that and the damed win7 bootloader took over so I took and image of a good win7 partition and am now making an image of the osx partition before i put them all back together on the drive just in case something craps out again.

 

Overall i am very impressed with the performance and am getting excited that i am about to have my first osx based system thats not running in vmware... lol! the networking is first and i would like to have sound if possible so i am play around with that as well when i have some time. I will try to put together a doc of my steps to install if anyone is interested.

 

back to playing with it! thx!

 

-Todd

[toorhax]

Hey toorhax!

 

Just wanted to drop a quick update.

 

Well its been a interesting weekend but i have it up and running, although no wireless or ethernet so its rather limited in as to it's usefulness in it's current state. At this point i have it recognizing the intel card but as i found out in another thread here, its the same problem everyone is having, it just won't associate to an unsecured network. apparently and thankfully updated and working drivers are supposedly forthcoming so i will be watching for them.

 

Have not even tried to install anything for audio but blurtooth and firewire appear to be working. usb is working great and i have plugged a ton of different devices and no issues. no sdcard or dimming of the screen, so no updates for you there. the mouse and keyboard work great, the video i chose during install was x3000 but its showing as no kexts installed in the profiler so not sure whats going on there. the digitizer pen works but is not aligned, seems the movement to too accelerated and am unsure of how to calibrate that in osx so another thing to play around with.

 

I stated off using the iDeneb but also installed iPC and found that to run a little smoother and also at least recognize the intel card. Also ran into some issues with my windows partition so reloaded that and the damed win7 bootloader took over so I took and image of a good win7 partition and am now making an image of the osx partition before i put them all back together on the drive just in case something craps out again.

 

Overall i am very impressed with the performance and am getting excited that i am about to have my first osx based system thats not running in vmware... lol! the networking is first and i would like to have sound if possible so i am play around with that as well when i have some time. I will try to put together a doc of my steps to install if anyone is interested.

 

back to playing with it! thx!

 

-Todd

 

Awesome job on getting things up on the Toughbook.

 

Couple things that might help....

 

1) My Ethernet worked out of the box.

2) Here is what my display show up as...

 

Intel GMA 950:

Chipset Model: GMA 950

Type: Display

Bus: Built-In

VRAM (Total): 64 MB of shared system memory

Vendor: Intel (0x8086)

Device ID: 0x27a2

Revision ID: 0x0003

Displays:

Display:

Display Type: LCD

Resolution: 1024 x 768

Depth: 32-bit Color

Built-In: Yes

Core Image: Hardware Accelerated

Mirror: Off

Online: Yes

Quartz Extreme: Supported

 

3) Download the driver from Wacom to calibrate the screen...

 

ftp://198.145.255.42/drivers/mac/consumer...ablet_508-2.dmg

 

although it looks like they have a newer driver than the one I am using here...

 

ftp://198.145.255.42/drivers/mac/consumer...ablet_511-1.dmg

 

I won't tell you how many days it took to find out which driver really worked. Enjoy.

 

 

I hope that helps. Holler if you need to compare to my machine for any of the kexts. I can dump my config here. No prob.

 

And congrats! As far as I know, you are the third person to get the CF-19 up and running.

 

Later,

toorhax

[indica]

some more updates...

 

found a few threads on my ethernet card and there is supposedly a way to fool it into working as it should that I need to sit down and read fully but sound like we just need to fool it into thinking its a close relative thats actually supported, think i will have some time tonight to parse the threads and see what i can come up with, in the mean time do you mind posting the output for yours so i can reference, from looking in devgmr in window$ its showing as a 88e8055 and the drivers i am seeing packages for we're 88e8056 and 88e805x and i have tried both, still no net.

 

for the digitizer i tried the drivers you sent found the older of the two worked best, could have just been it flaking out on the first try but i could not click with the pen at all using the newer ones. so uninstalled and reinstalled the older one and it worked like a champ! thanks for that, another big one off the list!

 

now onto the sound. The more and more I keep thinking about this, its becoming more and more important to get it working. no show stopper by any means but i also found a few threads on the issue and while i didn't even have a chance to skim them, it at least gives me hope someone is either using them or wants too. either way i am not alone and hopefully i can find something more positive but thats for after the kids go to bed and i get some time alone to get to reading all these bookmarked threads.

 

thanks again for your all your help and for the drivers as well, your countess hours you spent are now being appreciated by at least one other person(countless others to hopefuly follow!) so again much appreciated!

 

oh one other thing i have been wanting to ask, what the hell was that program that turned your screen red and green for night vision. that i think i need more than the wireless at this point, just sick!

 

-Todd

[toorhax]

some more updates...

 

found a few threads on my ethernet card and there is supposedly a way to fool it into working as it should that I need to sit down and read fully but sound like we just need to fool it into thinking its a close relative thats actually supported, think i will have some time tonight to parse the threads and see what i can come up with, in the mean time do you mind posting the output for yours so i can reference, from looking in devgmr in window$ its showing as a 88e8055 and the drivers i am seeing packages for we're 88e8056 and 88e805x and i have tried both, still no net.

 

for the digitizer i tried the drivers you sent found the older of the two worked best, could have just been it flaking out on the first try but i could not click with the pen at all using the newer ones. so uninstalled and reinstalled the older one and it worked like a champ! thanks for that, another big one off the list!

 

now onto the sound. The more and more I keep thinking about this, its becoming more and more important to get it working. no show stopper by any means but i also found a few threads on the issue and while i didn't even have a chance to skim them, it at least gives me hope someone is either using them or wants too. either way i am not alone and hopefully i can find something more positive but thats for after the kids go to bed and i get some time alone to get to reading all these bookmarked threads.

 

thanks again for your all your help and for the drivers as well, your countess hours you spent are now being appreciated by at least one other person(countless others to hopefuly follow!) so again much appreciated!

 

oh one other thing i have been wanting to ask, what the hell was that program that turned your screen red and green for night vision. that i think i need more than the wireless at this point, just sick!

 

-Todd

 

Okee dokee. This ethernet thing has me fascinated because it was the one thing that I *could* get to work reliably across all of the distros that I tried. It looks like this is the driver that my Toughbook likes at this point...

 

75 0 0x4c732000 0x6000 0x5000 com.apple.driver.AppleRTL8139Ethernet (1.4.1) <67 17 6 5 4 2>

 

I dumped all of the kexts that I am using to an attached file, so that might help a bit.

 

If you go into /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleRTL8139Ethernet.kext/Contents you should try to make the Info.plist look like the one attached.

 

So... hopefully that closes some loops on the ethernet driver.

 

Note that I have had some weirdness on the ethernet driver on some networks. Latency jumps and unstability. Most of the places I work have 802.11 g or n, so I am a bit spoiled that I don't have to use the copper too much. That said, when it is working, it does work well.

 

Glad that the digitizer works. The utility is flackey. Then again, it wasn't really designed for the digitizer in the back of the toughbook screen. I found it would work by matching up some of the pci id's from the developer and OEM fourms. Lets just say that it took a little while to find the right one. So, I would definetly keep a copy of that file safe. There is no telling when Wacom might yank or change that driver.

 

I played with sound a bit and kinda gave up. I remember that I was trying the driver that would take the dump from proc under linux and mod the driver under OSX. (I am pulling a blank on the name of it now.) Everything was so close that I felt that I needed to just send the dump to the developer and let them know that I was an outlier. They seemed very quick to add the other laptops that were coming online. I just honestly never got around to it.

 

That said, the Bluetooth audio should work fine. That has been my cheap workaround. I have a good set of Sony Bluetooth headphones that I use all the time when I am working.

 

Now for two more fun links. (This is how I keep you coming back with more info.)

 

The red screen thing is an app called Black Light. It is one of the sneaky ways of dimming the screen even though you don't have brightness control. It bacically hacks at the gamma control rather than changing the backlight level.

 

http://michelf.com/projects/black-light/

 

And now for the one thing that I didn't put in the video. Run this and you can have iPhone flicking goodness on all of your slider bars...

 

http://www.marcmoini.com/sx_en.html

 

Here is the hack.... Install the extension and go into the "Grab Scroll" settings and set it to "Button 5". Then go to your Pen Tablet control panel and make the clicker on the pen "5th Click". Now any control that has a slider bar can be "flicked" iPhone-style by pressing the button with your index finger and flicking the screen. I *always* get jaw drops when I grab the face of Safari or a PDF in preview and flick the page to the next.

 

So let me know how you do with the ethernet and sound. I have a couple other tricks up my sleeve to still show you. I just want to make sure that you don't go on overload and begin neglecting your wife and children.

 

Talk to you soon,

toorhax

 

P.S. (to other people) If you are reading this thread and have another toughbook working or another tablet, please drop a line in this thread. I haven't seen a whole lot of interest in the OSX tablet games, so I haven't been saying too much. If there are more people out there, holler so we can all benefit from eath other.

KuuKexts.txt

Info.plist.txt

[indica]

Okee dokee. This ethernet thing has me fascinated because it was the one thing that I *could* get to work reliably across all of the distros that I tried. It looks like this is the driver that my Toughbook likes at this point...

 

75 0 0x4c732000 0x6000 0x5000 com.apple.driver.AppleRTL8139Ethernet (1.4.1) <67 17 6 5 4 2>

 

I dumped all of the kexts that I am using to an attached file, so that might help a bit.

 

If you go into /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleRTL8139Ethernet.kext/Contents you should try to make the Info.plist look like the one attached.

 

So... hopefully that closes some loops on the ethernet driver.

 

Note that I have had some weirdness on the ethernet driver on some networks. Latency jumps and unstability. Most of the places I work have 802.11 g or n, so I am a bit spoiled that I don't have to use the copper too much. That said, when it is working, it does work well.

 

Glad that the digitizer works. The utility is flackey. Then again, it wasn't really designed for the digitizer in the back of the toughbook screen. I found it would work by matching up some of the pci id's from the developer and OEM fourms. Lets just say that it took a little while to find the right one. So, I would definetly keep a copy of that file safe. There is no telling when Wacom might yank or change that driver.

 

I played with sound a bit and kinda gave up. I remember that I was trying the driver that would take the dump from proc under linux and mod the driver under OSX. (I am pulling a blank on the name of it now.) Everything was so close that I felt that I needed to just send the dump to the developer and let them know that I was an outlier. They seemed very quick to add the other laptops that were coming online. I just honestly never got around to it.

 

That said, the Bluetooth audio should work fine. That has been my cheap workaround. I have a good set of Sony Bluetooth headphones that I use all the time when I am working.

 

Now for two more fun links. (This is how I keep you coming back with more info.)

 

The red screen thing is an app called Black Light. It is one of the sneaky ways of dimming the screen even though you don't have brightness control. It bacically hacks at the gamma control rather than changing the backlight level.

 

http://michelf.com/projects/black-light/

 

And now for the one thing that I didn't put in the video. Run this and you can have iPhone flicking goodness on all of your slider bars...

 

http://www.marcmoini.com/sx_en.html

 

Here is the hack.... Install the extension and go into the "Grab Scroll" settings and set it to "Button 5". Then go to your Pen Tablet control panel and make the clicker on the pen "5th Click". Now any control that has a slider bar can be "flicked" iPhone-style by pressing the button with your index finger and flicking the screen. I *always* get jaw drops when I grab the face of Safari or a PDF in preview and flick the page to the next.

 

So let me know how you do with the ethernet and sound. I have a couple other tricks up my sleeve to still show you. I just want to make sure that you don't go on overload and begin neglecting your wife and children.

 

Talk to you soon,

toorhax

 

P.S. (to other people) If you are reading this thread and have another toughbook working or another tablet, please drop a line in this thread. I haven't seen a whole lot of interest in the OSX tablet games, so I haven't been saying too much. If there are more people out there, holler so we can all benefit from eath other.

 

wow man, you had my jaw dropped long before i evn got to that part, but yeah drool started to come out then... either way i am going to soak it all in for now, never did get around to doing any reading tonight so looks like i am going to find some "lab" time at work tomorrow to do some completely worked related "research"

 

I don't know how to thank you enough for your help, the world needs more people like you. if you are ever around detroit area, i owe you several beers!

[indica]

Hey again, some small but positive updates, had a really weird experience while testing another loadout and while it was stuck at the apple screen during one of the failed boots, i was just working on another computer waiting to see if it would boot into the gui. out of no where i get some song start playing, i took a double take and had to walk over to it to make sure it was actually coming out of the toughbook, it was. stuck at the apple boot screen but playing a song, i thought well at least the speakers sound good! i repeated the same install procedure but this time booted with verbose output and it was looking like at least the new audio driver i chose seems to be at least partially working... so i revert back to one of my failsafe setups and just add the azalia driver to my loadout and boom the new user registration comes up and we officially have sound!!

 

So toorhax, I know this wasn't something you were dieing to have but its a little something I can give back to you for all of the help you have given me!!

 

Take a look at this thread and the pkg file is in the first post so give it a shot and see if it gets you sound on yours. So far i know its output only, no sound input or output to the headphone jacks but at least the speakers now work!

 

linky

 

now i am moving on to the ethernet, will see what I can't come up with today!

 

Thx!

 

-Todd

[indica]

hey toorhax,

guess I just noticed but your driver is showing as a realtek for the nic, now thats leading me to wonder if we may have different toughbooks, do you know if yours is a mki mkii or mkiii off hand.

 

I know specifically mine is a cf-19f/mkii model.

 

just wondering if we may have some not so subtle differences in our hardware.

 

either way, I am going to take a good back up and try the realtek driver out, the first backup i made using carbon copy cloner didnt seem to work when i restored so I am going to try and create a good disk image from disk utility from the bootdisk. I don't believe the version of ghost or rdeploy I am using supports HFS+ so guessing that should be a decent way of backing up. I guess I will find out if I have to restore. ;-)

 

back in a bit!

[indica]

ok ok ok, have been making some serious progress. now at the point where its going to be more beneficial for me to just get my hands on an airport card and just be done with the whole thing! lol.

 

lots of updates and I am planning to put a full howto together for cf-19 with iAtkos 10.5.7 as that is where i am at now, but also convinced we have different models of toughbooks, i know for sure i am mkii and thinking you may have the newer ones or the mkiii's as they are known.

 

as of now, full hardware support with QE using x3100 drivers, found the video issues i had were nothing more than resolution issues fixed with an external monitor, here was some help, but more on that later.

 

also have the sd card working and although i have not tested it for speed or even tested it extensively but so far reads and writes seem to be at similar speeds as under windows.

 

here is a link to thread i found it in and to specifically the kext thats working for me!

 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...st&id=51464 (0x08221180 Vendor & Dev id)

 

so been looking around and just wanted to be sure i am looking for the correct atheros card. so toorhax do you know the exact model i should be looking for?

 

if this is the model; AR5BXB72. then they are quite penty on the bay and fairly affordable as well. If you are still out there following this let me know.

 

And thanks again toorhax for setting me down this path, I am very very satisfied with how it is working right now, very very stable and quite quick for whats under the hood. I would have never even tried this if it werent for you making your youtube video.

 

oh and some other things i have noticed since running 10.5.7 now, it does seem to sleep and resume better now, and i am getting sound input using the apple HDA driver instead of the azalia one i metioned earlier. reboot doesn't work still although shutdown seems to drop everything down fine.

 

tried the realtek 8139 and didnt have any luck with it. this is what i am going to play around with today and once i have everything operation i plan on gathering all my notes and links into a nice article to share.

 

thanks again and hope to hear from you soon!

 

-Todd

[indica]

well i am happy to say i am posting in these forums for the first time on a box running osx86!! seems the plist hack worked once i cleaned all the kexts from the plugin dir under IONetworkingFamily.kext. Also have to just remove the secondary pci dev id entry all together and without even rebooting the network config panel popped up!

 

so now its back to the wireless and then if i want to be all crazy, guess i could see if i can't get the buttons on the front going. to be honest I am not quite sure if the brightness is maxed out quite anymore, seems to be toned down a bit and i am still trying to figure out where to adjust screen brightness in OSX.

 

so going to enjoy this a bit and get all my apps updated and then take a good image. will go on from there!!

 

todd

[CANADAS ARMY]

Thought that you guys might like this...

 

 

 

Nice!

 

Is this yours?

[toorhax]

Nice!

 

Is this yours?

 

 

Yep. Been using it for about two years now.

 

 

 

well i am happy to say i am posting in these forums for the first time on a box running osx86!! seems the plist hack worked once i cleaned all the kexts from the plugin dir under IONetworkingFamily.kext. Also have to just remove the secondary pci dev id entry all together and without even rebooting the network config panel popped up!

 

so now its back to the wireless and then if i want to be all crazy, guess i could see if i can't get the buttons on the front going. to be honest I am not quite sure if the brightness is maxed out quite anymore, seems to be toned down a bit and i am still trying to figure out where to adjust screen brightness in OSX.

 

so going to enjoy this a bit and get all my apps updated and then take a good image. will go on from there!!

 

todd

 

 

Hey dude. Somehow I stopped getting updates from this thread. Glad to hear that you finally got everything up.

 

You still using the laptop? Just curious.

[CANADAS ARMY]

Anyone try snow leopard?

 

I burned the Kalway disc, havent installed it quite yet (my CF-19 is still shipping), but it has a lot of driver options (and voodoo drivers) as custom kernels.

 

Once it gets here, I'll give it a go and let you guys know how it went

[toorhax]

I have not put Snow Leopard on it yet, but it is on my todo list in the next few months. I am finishing up with my degree (which is pulling rank) and then I am going to get on it.

 

Let me know how it goes.