mac osx 10.5.1 kalway on Lenovo Thinkpad T43 2668AJU

I wrote this post just for testing mac os x system only. If you like the mac os x system, I highly suggest you to buy an apple product and enjoy the benefit. The following install only allows you to have the system, but does not allow you to update the security patches. I have been reading many posts on the web, and the most useful is kooty’s. His fix for the wireless is not suitable for my thinkpad, since mine is “IBM 802.11 a/b/g” wireless card, not the intel 2200 card. The later requires the google code driver mentioned in kooty.

Before the start, here is my hardware list.
lspci using a linux tool

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM/GMS/910GML Express Processor to DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%231" target="_blank" class="litwitter">#1</a> (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%232" target="_blank" class="litwitter">#2</a> (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%233" target="_blank" class="litwitter">#3</a> (rev 03)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%234" target="_blank" class="litwitter">#4</a> (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev d3)
00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 11)
0b:00.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev 8d)
0b:02.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. <strong>AR5212 802.11abg NIC</strong> (rev 01)

cat /proc/cpuinfo shows the cpu I have does not support SSE3, which means I cannot use the 10.5.3 kalway Combo update.

processor	: 0
vendor_id	: GenuineIntel
cpu family	: 6
model		: 13
model name	: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz
stepping	: 8
cpu MHz		: 798.000
cache size	: 2048 KB
fdiv_bug	: no
hlt_bug		: no
f00f_bug	: no
coma_bug	: no
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 2
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe nx up bts est tm2
bogomips	: 1597.80
clflush size	: 64

Here is the basic installation steps (modified from kooty’s post).

1. You must use the paperclip trick to short out pins 6 and 12 on your VGA out. Just bend a paperclip into a U shape, with ends long enough to touch the contacts on both sides. Look at the following diagram to see which pins. I manage to make the wire attach close/tight to the VGA port. The purpose is to fake the osx that there is an external screen, which is required for LCD proper display.

2. You must back up all your data onto an external HDD, because we will be formatting the entire drive. Also, disable all CPU power management features in the BIOS because it slows the computer down quite a bit.

3. Download the install ISO (10.5.1 kalway as keyword, and the md5sum is f8546bde2a5b3c7dff47f2aab31862a9). Make sure you get the Kalyway 10.5.1 ISO, NOT any of the ToH ISO. The Kalyway 10.5.2 ISO failed to boot in my machine. I guess the errors occur during the recognition of the thinkpad t43 harddrive, but no clue why.

4. Fire up the computer using the burnt DVD, and press enter when it asks you for startup options.
Wait for this thing to boot up, which is about 10-20 minutes. If you get stuck on a blue screen with no cursor, that means that you did the paperclip mod wrong.

5. Open up Disk Utility from the top menu, and create one partition (and name it whatever you want; the hfs+ is a better format than fat). Just a note: linux can not write to the hfs+ journalized partition, but the none journalized version can be written by linux driver.

6. Before start the install, optimize the system by clicking the lower left button. When you get to the setup options screen, select SSE2 System, the MBR Bootloader, and also the Azalia Audio-OUT package. Wait for the computer to finish installing, and then restart your computer.

Everything except the wireless and Quartz Extreme should be working now.

Follow this page to fix the wireless card (mine is NOT iwl2200)

1. open terminal
2. browse to the folder /System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/
3. make a ls -ls and look for the kext “AirPortAtheros.kext”
4. browse into the folder AirPortAtheros/Contents/
5. open the file Info.plist as super user with vi or nano
6. add the text “pci168c,1014 ” within “IONameMatch” in the key-section “Atheros Wireless LAN PCI”
7. save and close the file
8. be sure to set the right permissions: “sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions” and “sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions”
9. clean the cache: “kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions” and reboot.

To change the screen display from 1024×768 to the native screen 1400×1050, I did the following step. After the reboot, the screen is perfect and I can have very smooth video play. (No QE, still good video effect, why? I notice that during the booting my ati M300 graphic card is recognized as ATI x600 64MB graphic card.)

sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist, add add the following:

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1400x1050x32</string>

put them before:

<key>Timeout</key>
<string>5</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Here is my screen after all the tweaking. I am really impressed!

During the tweaking process, I found that thinkpad does not support the 2-finger scrolling through the FFScroll software. Although the post claimed that “working on MOST laptop trackpads, working with most ALPS and Synaptics trackpads”, it is NOT working with thinkpad! To reverse it:

sudo -s
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/ApplePS2Controller.kext/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePS2Trackpad.kext
(Only this file, not the ApplePS2Controller, else keyboard and mouse won’t work anymore!)
rm -rf /Library/PreferenPanes/FFScrollPreferencePane.prefPane
rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.apple.driver.ApplePS2Trackpad.plist
rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/FFScroll
rm -rf /usr/local/bin/FFScrollDaemon
restore the backup, by cp -R ApplePS2Controller.kext /System/Library/Extensions/ApplePS2Controller.kext and change the permission accordingly

The over-all feeling is that mac os x is a great system evolved from FreeBSD/UNIX , although the Quartz Extreme graphic effect and the scrolling are not working right now.

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Update1, 2008-6-13:
From apple, I found the following snapshot how to verify the CI/QE in system profiler:

As commented below, there is an issue about the ethernet connection, which is due to inappropriate mac address setting. Use the exact command in linux, I fix it easily! [sudo ifconfig en0 ether {ur mac address}] However, I have to do it every time after reboot.

About the trackpoint of the thinkpad, it is disabled after login, which means that only the touchpad works. I do not know why.