Browsing all articles from December, 2009

samsung-n310-300x262

One of my friends brought round a notebook for me to Hackintosh yesterday. Unlike the usual god no… kind of options I get given, this is actually a nice machine.
This one is almost as Mac friendly as my current Nano sized Hackintosh (aka Loz’s Hackbook Nano)

I present the next best thing in Mini Mac’s (until the will it? won’t it? Mac Tablet comes out!) – The Samsung N310

The Samsung is a generic Atom based Netbook with the following hardware:

CPU Intel Atom N270, 1600 Mhz
Chipset Intel 82945GSE Graphics Controller
Graphics Card Intel GMA 950
Audio Realtek ALC272
Wifi Atheros AR5007EG Wireless
Ethernet Marvell Yukon 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet
Bluetooth Adapter USB Based Generic
Webcam USB Based Namuga 1.3M

Installation is remarkably easy.
You’ll need the following things – an External USB DVD drive, and Snow Leopard.

Download the latest NetbookInstaller ISO from here – http://osx.mechdrew.com/downloads/
Burn to CD. Connect your USB drive to the N310, and boot off of the newly burned CD.

Follow the instructions to swap with your Snow Leopard DVD at the appropriate time, and boot into the installer.
Install as normal (in my case, I just wiped the existing partitions, set the boot type to GUID instead of MBR in Partition, Options, and did a full install)
Once the OS reboots, boot from the NetbookInstaller ISO again, but this time choose the HDD (as we still need to install a valid bootsector for the OS to run)

The OS should boot up ok, fill in the relevant bits and pieces, and get to the desktop screen.
Open up NetBookMaker from the CD, navigate to the Tools folder and open NetbookInstaller:

I did this using 0.8.3RC4, but newer versions should be similar.
Click Continue for the Unrecognized Hardware Prompt.

Choose the correct disk in the Volume Dropdown, and
Check Install Chameleon 2 RC3
Check Install General Extensions
Check Generate a System Specific DSDT.AML file.
Uncheck everything else.

Click Install.

It should trundle away for a few minutes, then recommend you reboot.

Remove the NetbookInstaller DVD, and make sure that you can reboot ok from the Hard Drive

Right now you should have working Webcam, Video, Bluetooth, and Trackpad will support 2 finger scroll (go to System / Preferences/ Trackpad to configure)

We’re still missing Wifi, Audio, and you’ll notice that sleep doesn’t quite work yet.
To install those, we’ll need to download some extra Kext’s, and replace the wifi card.

Wifi – the original card is a crap atheros. I couldn’t be buggered looking for drivers, and immediately swapped it out for a Dell1390 Broadcom card. Cheap, and the same as real Macbooks, so no driver issues.
The N310 is reasonably easy to disassemble, just remove all the plastic plugs underneath (including the larger feet ones), and remove the screws. Gently remove the case bottom, and replace the wifi card.
If you use the Dell1390 you won’t need to install any drivers, they’re built in, yay!

For the remaining drivers, see below:
Audio – As I’m a nice person, I’ve uploaded the working driver here – http://www.kexts.com/view/182-alc272_%28snow_leopard%29.html
Sleep – Go to http://www.superhai.com/darwin.html, and download the 2 Snow Leopard kexts (VoodooBattery.kext, VoodooPowerMini.kext).

Download those to the desktop, unzip the kexts.
Copy to /Extras/GeneralExtensions, then rebuild the Extension cache.

You can do that manually or use a tool. NetbookInstaller nicely places a program called UpdateExtra into the /Extra folder which can rebuild the Extension cache for you.

Thats pretty much it!

If you are having problems with the laptop waking from sleep:
I’ve uploaded a DSDT.aml for the n310 here – DSDT.aml. you’ll need to rename it so that the .N310 is removed, and copy into the root folder over the existing DSDT.aml that NetBookMaker may or may not have created. I’d appreciate comments as to whether this works for you or not.

Iain in the comments thread was nice enough to email his working sleep DSDT.aml file, can some people try both and see if either work for them? Also check the BIOS settings as per Iain’s comment: Enabled EDB. Disabled Legacy USB Support. Enabled USB S3 Wake-Up

Download his DSDT.aml here. To use, rename file to DSDT.aml, and copy to /Extra, then reboot.

Note: If you do mess around with DSDT.aml files, please have a working recovery method available that you can access the hard drive with (eg an OSX Install DVD + Boot132 CD). Apple’s install DVD can also be used for recovery.

If you find that you can’t boot after installing the DSDT.aml, boot from the Boot132 CD or USB, then boot into to the OSX install DVD. Go to terminal in the installer, and delete the offending file, then reboot.

Now you should have a fully working Samsung N310 running OSX Snow Leopard!

I haven’t bothered messing around with the brightness or volume stuff, but the volume on/off keyboard functions work, as do the trackpad on/off.

Good luck with yours!

Useful links:
http://www.kexts.com – kexts (drivers) for OSX
http://www.superhai.com/darwin.html – Power related drivers for OSX
http://osx.mechdrew.com/ – MechDrew from MyDellMini’s site on Hackintosh Installs
http://cid-8b65993ef55cf014.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/OSx86/Snow%20Leopard – some Czech site hosted on live.com full of goodies/ kexts

Apple used to have info about where phones came from on their website, but for some reason have now deleted that info.
Below is a list of verified unlocked part numbers.

Hong Kong

MB489ZP/A 8gb blk
MB496ZP/A 16gb blk
MB500ZP/A 16gb white
Read more »

Seems that when it rains, it pours.

The gods were not content to give us only one issue today from an external provider, but two!

At approximately 7pm the network that includes our mail server was on got hit by a massive denial of service attack.
The nice people at Shanghai Telecom decided that they would simply shut off routing for the entire subnet as their optimal solution.

We have a nice graph of that happening here:

net01.day

Note the sudden precipitous drop in network traffic starting at approximately 7pm, which lasted until approximately 8pm.

We also have images of the DoS attack [although not completely, as our network was null routed (shut off) for the brunt of the attack]

You can see the sudden increase in incoming traffic in this image below (which occurred before they killed the network completely).
The green line which indicates incoming packets suddenly goes sky high before the network people shut off the network.

net02z.day

Some of the other servers also got hit by this – notable our web servers, although they didn’t cut those off thankfully.
See below for a view of that traffic.

net02z.88.213.day

As the old curse goes – may you live in interesting times.
Some days are more interesting than others!

Early Monday morning it was bought to our attention that some clients could not receive mail, and others were having difficultly reaching their subdomains.

Investigation of the issue showed that the affected clients were missing DNS records.

Our DNS services are provided by a 3rd party – ServerBeach.
ServerBeach recently got bought out by a larger company Peer1.

The geniuses at Peer1 have managed to lose all our DNS info for over 400 of our domains during a migration from ServerBeach to Peer1 provided services, and now a substantial number of our clients have missing or incomplete DNS records.

They are aware of the issue, and are working on it.

We received an email notice about this this morning (after 7 or 8 hours of their DNS being offline)

Dear ServerBeach Customer,

At approximately 11:30am CST today we encountered an issue with our DNS services being imported into the new ServerBeach portal. This may be causing an interruption for certain domains that are hosted on the GeoDNS servers.

We are currently working diligently to correct this issue and will provide an update when DNS services are fully functional.

All of us at ServerBeach sincerely regret the inconveniences associated with this incident, and will fully stand behind our Service Level Agreement. We apologize for this disruption and thank you for your continued patronage and understanding.

If you have any questions regarding this issue, please open an online ticket athttps://my.serverbeach.com/ or contact our support team at 1-800-741-9939.

Regards,

Brian Daffern
Director of Support

We have raised a number of tickets with ServerBeach / Peer1 regarding this, and hope for a speedy resolution to the matter.

As an interim measure I’ve added forwarding records for domains affected, so that mail received on the webservers that host affected domains know to forward mail to the correct mail server.

ServerBeach is updating a forum post regarding this issue here:
http://forums.serverbeach.com/showthread.php?t=7919
(Note that in the second post they incorrectly say it has been resolved. It has not been resolved yet)

If ServerBeach / Peer1 cannot resolve this by this evening, we may have to look at changing to a different DNS provider.
This is a last resort measure though, as DNS server changes take 1-2 days to propagate throughout the internet.

Apologies for any inconvenience, and we hope you can bear with us while we resolve the situation.

If you have any questions, please address them to our support email: support at computersolutions.cn

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Recent Comments

  • Katapaltes: @Burlesque: You might reset the BIOS to its defaults to see if it helps. If you have Windows still...
  • emmanuel: Hi there, great tutos ! i got mine, with à 1390 wifi card. The only issue i still have is : When i start...
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