Lion has been here for a while. And my games PenguinLinks 2 were out as well. Now it’s time to upgrade my hackintosh to the latest OSX — Lion.
In my previous post — A Perfect Hackintosh Machine, I have described how I installed Snow Leopard on my almost-4-years-old, but still pretty decent desktop. And installing Lion is pretty similar.
(Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple’s End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please check the Aggreement before following these steps.)
To make things less complicated, I decided to do a fresh install and then migrate all my stuff from Time Machine backup (that’s one of many reasons why I love TM!). The whole installation process is actually very easy — thanks to this really good tutorial: Lion installation via USB stick using Chameleon, DP4, GM and FINAL. I just followed the guide and after about half hour, Lion is up and running on my desktop. And then I migrated all my personal stuff and Applications from TM backup, which takes a little bit more than an hour. The installation process is very smooth so far.
But there are a few glitches.
First, the default network card doesn’t work. The chipset of my built-in network card is RTL8111B. To make it work, I have to replace the IONetworkingFamily.kext (put it in /Extra/Extensions).
Secondly, the sound card doesn’t work, which is expected since ALC888 is not supported natively by Apple since 10.6.3. To fix it, we need three extensions: ALC8xxHDA.kext, AppleHDA.kext ad HDAEnabler888.kext. Copy all three extensions to /Extra/Extensions directory, and then manually copy AppleHDAppleHDA.kext ad HDAEnabler888.kextAppleHDA.kext to /System/Library/Extensions. Remember to use kext utility to fix permission after that. All three extensions can be downloaded here.
After reboot, everything seems working fine now. However, when I tried to download Xcode 4 from Mac App Store, I got a weird message “Your device or computer could not be verified. Contact support for assistance.” After some research, it seems this is caused by Mac App Store not recognizing the ethernet card. It can be fixed by adding these lines to the Boot.plist file:
EthernetBuiltIn Yes
Now my hackintosh almost runs perfectly — except sleep. But I don’t care this feature that much because it’s really fast to boot from SSD. So I just turn the machine off when needed.
The last mission is to upgrade to the latest 10.7.1. The first upgrade made my system unbootable. The message shows it was caused by SleepEnabler.kext. Fortunately the Internet can always come to help. A new version of this extension, which is compatible with 10.7.1, is already available online (click to dowload). After replacing the old one and a reboot(remember to use “-f” option when reboot, which will clear the kext cache), my hackintosh is happily running on the latest OSX.
P.S. There is a final catch after all these are setup. When I tried to open an image with Preview, it crashes. At first I thought it must be some library not fully compatible. But after soem research, it turns out a simpler issue: since my SSD only has 120GB, I removed the original “Downloads” directory from my home, and created a symbolic link to the “Downloads” directory on my second harddrive. That’s the cause of crash (don’t ask me, I don’t know why Preview is unhappy about the link). The fix is easy: just remove the symbolic link, and then run Preview once, and then re-create the link. That’s it! Everybody is happy.
Summary of links:
- My previous post: A Perfect Hackintosh Machine
- Lion installation guide
- IONetworkingFamily.kext
- Files to fix sound
- SleepEnabler.kext: compatible with 10.7.1
P.S. 11/1/2011: Today I just realized my dvd drive has stopped working. I barely use it, that’s why I haven’t noticed that earlier. Since my DVD drive is a really old IDE one, I need the JMicron36xATA.kext to make it work with Lion, which can be found here.
