Tuesday, February 11, 2014

MacWimp - Low Power Hackintosh

The cheapest Hackintosh I ever built!

Running Zentyal for my small private network was a great deal for some time. Nothing to be said against Zentyal, however, I might a used a different platform for running it on.
What platform? Well, that was a GA-Z77N-WiFi running an Intel Celeron G1610 dual core processor. The MoBo is a total overkill to a G1610, which cannot be overclocked, and so is a G1610 to a very small network "enterprise" server. Actually, the CPU was bored most of the time anyway.

So, is there any better use for the CPU and the MoBo?

Yep! It seems that folks have successfully installed OS-X on that particular platform. Although I never built the system for OS-X, now that it was unemployed for some time, it might as well serve as a simple Hackintosh workstation!

The hardware involved:
  • Intel Celeron G1610
  • GigaByte Z77N-WiFi
  • Corsair 2x4GB DDR3 (1333MHz)
  • Seagate Momentus 2.5" 160GB
  • Cool Master Elite 100 
  • Logitech K400r
  • Philips 236V4
Actually, I had the HDD wafting about in my "junk box", it came from some computer, I can't even remember (honestly!).
The RAM I got for cheap from a superstore...

  • You may see that the case actually wont allow for a graphics card, hence, the internal HD2500 GPU has to be used.

Not playing, I went using OS-X 10.9.1 straight away. Booting it, using "fail safe" (-x) worked OOB. However, after running MultiBeast 6.1, things were not working out so well. The system booted, but only with the "-x" option.
At the end, I got this weakling to run with information you can find on google searching for "G1610 HD2500 GraphicsEnabler IGPEnabler Hackintosh".

Finally, I got the whole thing booting regularly with
  • Internal Graphics Memory set to 32MB (bios)
  • inserted a device properties entry into /Extra/org.Chameleon.boot.plist
  • removed AppleIntelHD4000Graphics.kext from /System/Libraby/Extensions
  • computer type set to MacMini6,2
Since I had to play a little to get thing running, there may be some more parameters, which I lost track of, to get the things flowing.

To make live easy to you, this is the content of my /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist:
        <key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>IGPEnabler</key>
        <string>No</string>
        <key>Kernel</key>
        <string>mach_kernel</string>
        <key>Kernel Flags</key>
        <string> -v</string>
        <key>Legacy Logo</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>Timeout</key>
        <string>2</string>
        <key>GenerateCStates</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>GeneratePStates</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>UseKernelCache</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>Graphics Mode</key>
        <string>"1920x1080x32"</string>
        <key>device-properties</key>  <string>7f0000000100000001000000730000000200000002010c00d041030a000000000101060000027fff04002c0000004100410050004c002c00690067002d0070006c006100740066006f0072006d002d00690064000000080000000b006601140000006800640061002d0067006600780000000d0000006f6e626f6172642d31</string>


So far, I am happy with the behavior of the box. Actually, TM backup to my server just went through fine.