Comments on: Building a Hackintosh Successful Attempt #1

By: benjamin

benjamin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:57:14 +0000

I’m glad the guide was useful for you! Unfortunately, I’m no longer running a hackintosh. The hardware I chose to use was simply not powerful enough for some of my needs, and because it was an Atom and not a processor OS X recognized, certain functionality was broken. I never tried virtualbox, so I can’t give you an answer there, but I would guess it’s a generic virtualbox/mac problem and not hackintosh specific.

By: zapsx

zapsx — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:02:47 +0000

Great guide, thank you so much for this. Just got my hackintosh running today. A bit embarrassing was not having sound and trying to figure it out for 2 hours and then realizing I plug the speakers into the input and not the output, duh, it was dark.

One question and I have searched insanlymac and the web with no definitive answers is: Does virtualbox work on this hackintosh. I cannot get Windows 7 to install using Virtualbox, keeps aborting when either trying with the dvd drive or the iso image. Has anyone out there had success with this? You help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers Zapsx

By: manfat

manfat — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:24:31 +0000

Perhaps try the voodoo kernel if vanilla has issues. this is a built in option on the final iPC 10.5.6 distro …

By: NERD

NERD — Sat, 16 May 2009 06:23:12 +0000

Actually, I will stick with 10.5.5, as I understand it is the most recent vanilla kernel to support the Atom’s hyperthreading. Turning it off just makes everything slow.

By: NERD

NERD — Sat, 16 May 2009 06:04:33 +0000

The kernel has changed in 10.5.7, and you cannot run the vanilla kernel with hyperthreading turned on. Turning it off in the BIOS will allow you to boot Mac OS X, but the speed is slower. I’m planning on sticking with 10.5.6.

By: benjamin

benjamin — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:36:30 +0000

I’m sorry, I haven’t tried yet. Not sure when I will get to that.

By: cblack

cblack — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:29:04 +0000

Can you upgrade to 10.5.7 without problems ?

By: benjamin

benjamin — Sun, 03 May 2009 05:36:52 +0000

Mike- That was one of the craziest things. I did get Netflix to stream a few times, but then it stopped and I was not able to achieve it again. Though, I even had problems on my Mac Book Pro, so at the time I thought it may be a Netflix issue. I gave up and haven’t gone back to try making it work again. Sorry for the bade news, but yes, it seemed to be a DRM issue.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:05:21 +0000

Ben how did you get Netflix to stream on your Hackintosh? I can get silverlight installed however when I try to watch a movie it gives me an error. guessing this is DRM related. Any helpful hints are greatly appreciated.
Thanks -m

By: benjamin

benjamin — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:35:43 +0000

The hardware is fast enough, though not by much. I’ve run Netflix under Windows and it’s really pretty nice. Under OS X it tended to have a bit of video stutter. My guess is that the Netflix/Sliverlight stack just isn’t optimized for OS X. (at least, not yet, I hope) That said, running as a hackintosh has a few other barriers for would be Netflix users. This CPU isn’t 100% recognized by the OS, so, it doesn’t even show as an Intel CPU in hardware profiler without some hacking. Because of that, you have to hack the Silverlight installer script to run properly. (now that I think about it, this could also maybe be a contributor to the slower performance) Furthermore, you have to do some hacking/tweaking to get certain apps to believe you are on a true Apple platform, thus allowing DRM technologies to run, such as is required with Netflix’s Silverlight video player.

All that said, yes the hardware will run it, but it’s extra tricky on Hackintosh. Best of luck to you!