Hat Trick?

Hello Everyone,

My sincere apologies for my extended absence. Many significant things have happened in my work and personal life since my last post, and I've had little (if any) time to work on Hackintoshes in general. As proud and amazed as I am at the community's progress, I must admit that buying an Apple-made OS X machine was/is a sound and enjoyed investment.

But... everyone needs a hobby.

In the last couple days I have been able to carve out some time to investigate the latest and greatest for OS X on some of my favorite pieces of hardware. Among these is my trusty E520, and it's GMA X3000 integrated graphics. And, unfortunately, the outlook isn't that good.

My best summary/theory on the status of things is that hardware acceleration is enabling, but the framebuffer keeps crashing late in initialization. If I had a working framebuffer, I think I'd have a new version to release. But, without it there is nothing useful - at all. I had a suspicion that Apple's updates would cause this back when I was creating the Snow Leopard drivers. The framebuffer was getting more and more finicky to the point that by 10.6.5 I couldn't get the framebuffer working at all. But... none of them crashed, they just left me with a black screen and no evidence of joy via SSH.

So, theoretically it might be possible. Lion's X3100 framebuffers do seem to behave differently than Snow Leopard's. But, I wouldn't give it a 2% chance at this point - at least with what ideas I have left. However, as some helpful visitors mentioned in the comments of my last announcement post, I believe you should be able to get 10.6.8 working fine if you carry forward some of the bundles (assuming you had it working in 10.6.2, I'm not saying it will magically fix blue screens). That's about the best I can offer right now, sorry!

Also, if anyone is interested, here is my current DSDT for the E520. When I moved to Lion I took a look to see what DSDTs were available for this model and didn't find anything terribly impressive. I didn't search for a really long time, but I took a quick glance around. I'm sure that someone somewhere has a better one, and if so please share it with the community, but this is what I'm currently working with. Use at your own risk, I am not providing support for it. Additionally, I found that AHCIPortInjector, AppleIntelE1000e, the latest FakeSMC, and VoodooHDA were all I needed to get a well-running system (aside from graphics, of course).

So... Leopard X3000, Snow Leopard X3000, but no hat trick


yet.