Hackintosh upgrade to Mac OSX 10.5.2

The other day Apple pushed up the 10.5.2 upgrade, which meant another exciting day of hacking around the Mac to figure out how it works. I’ve blogged about building the hackintosh, upgrading it to 10.5.1, and here is how you move to 10.5.2:

1. First download the 10.5.2 dmg from Apple.
2. Open up terminal and su to root: sudo -s
3. Execute the following command and let the process work in the background while you launch the installer: while sleep 1; do rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext; done
4. Proceed with the installation, when its done it will give you an option to reboot the system. Don’t. Go to the terminal and end the process above by hitting CTRL+C.
5. Type: sudo nano /System/InstallAtStartup/scripts/1
6. Replace the text “Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext” with “dsmos.kext” (it is towards the bottom of the file.
7. Reboot and at the boot manager screen press any key and pass -s flag to boot in the single user console mode.
8. Type: /sbin/fsck -fy
9. After it’s done reboot and you’ll be in Mac OS X 10.5.2

If you neglect to do steps 7 and 8 your system will reboot into the grey spinner screen and be stuck at it forever.

Other Notes

Don’t install the Leopard Video Driver Updates, they really break a lot of stuff. Also, Leopard 10.5.2 feels a LOT slower than 10.5.1 at least in my limited use of the PC as a digital picture frame.

I still find MacOS X to be a fairly useless as a platform in general. You can only launch a single instance of an application (not kidding) which means you can only run one copy of Firefox or one copy of terminal. This is incredibly limiting for any actual use beyond hobbyist that works on one thing at a time (or has plenty of time to keep on launching additional windows or from the terminal) – so while it can launch multiple windows, they all still run under the same instance – and when that instance bails, so does everything else.

However, it is SSSOOO pretty! (written with a lisp and a limp wrist flip)