[TipsyTC]

whats happeded to meklort & bmaltais i've enjoying reading their posts on this new installer they are woring on, now its all gone quiet. !!!

[meklort]

Mostly went to a chatroom.
Basically where were are at is that boot maker works perfectly for 10.5.6 dvds, however it does not worker on 10.5.0 / 10.5.1 (untested w/ 10.5.4).

Right now it's being modified to do things the way the dellefi boot maker did for pre 10.5.4 dvds by copying over the 10.5.6 kernel as well as mkext.

Including all of the kexts in /Extra/mkext allows the system to survive an update from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 without having a garbled screen. Once you update, you just need to regenerate the extension cache (with the installer, although update extra would work, just without newly patched graphics and such).

[bmaltais]

Originally Posted by meklort

Mostly went to a chatroom.
Basically where were are at is that boot maker works perfectly for 10.5.6 dvds, however it does not worker on 10.5.0 / 10.5.1 (untested w/ 10.5.4).

Right now it's being modified to do things the way the dellefi boot maker did for pre 10.5.4 dvds by copying over the 10.5.6 kernel as well as mkext.

Including all of the kexts in /Extra/mkext allows the system to survive an update from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 without having a garbled screen. Once you update, you just need to regenerate the extension cache (with the installer, although update extra would work, just without newly patched graphics and such).

Yeak, sorry about cutting you cold like that... but chatroom is much more convenient to do back and forth testing.

As Meklort is saying things are moving along quite well. Meklort is an amazing programmer by the way ;-) We are lucky to have him on board.

I am planning to do more testing tonight. Hopefully this will validate the whole process for installing from 10.5.0 and applying the Combo patch to 10.5.7 without any GFX issues after rebooting from Combo patching.

[TipsyTC]

Thanks Guys its good to hear from you again, I very excited to try out all the hard work you've been doing when its ready.

[bmaltais]

Originally Posted by TipsyTC

Thanks Guys its good to hear from you again, I very excited to try out all the hard work you've been doing when its ready.

Meklort and I where talking about releasing an Alpha release for the adventurous out there. Why adventurous? Because you pretty much need to either sacrifice your current install... or use an external USB HD to put the installation on.

Releasing the Alpha will help us get more testing done with various version of the DVD. FOr example I own a 10.5.0 (original upgrade DVD) and a 10.5.6 (standalone).

Last night we found out the 10;.5.0 would kernel panic when using the new method... Testing with other release may reveal other issues.

[meklort]

Well, I just competed the install version detection, which make the file 14mb instead of 4.6mb. The newly installed os (if its 10.5.1 or 10.5.1) will not be bootable unless if you use the boot drive to boot (assuming it uses the mkext on it first, if not then it wont be bootable either way). Once it's updated to 10.5.4+ it should boot fine if you re run the cli.

I'll try to package up an alpha with a few more fixes soon.

[bmaltais]

Originally Posted by meklort

Well, I just competed the install version detection, which make the file 14mb instead of 4.6mb. The newly installed os (if its 10.5.1 or 10.5.1) will not be bootable unless if you use the boot drive to boot (assuming it uses the mkext on it first, if not then it wont be bootable either way). Once it's updated to 10.5.4+ it should boot fine if you re run the cli.

I'll try to package up an alpha with a few more fixes soon.

Hummm... why is that... could you not copy the tmp kernel and boot mkext to /volume/dst and boot with that?

Then apply the combo patch and then boot with -v -x to finally run the NetbookInstaller to create the final mkext that will boot just fine on it's own.

[meklort]

You could. I'll make the (gui) installer only run on 10.5.4+ systems so that people have ot update before it's used.

The cli / postinstall will copy over the mkext and kernel.

[underwhelmed]

I'm waiting with great anticipation for the alpha to try it out. I am planning to reinstall anyway, I want to go back to Safari 3. I have a 10.5.6 Leo retail disk and a external dvd drive standing by.

No rush, you guys work your magic and please let us know when it's ready for us guinea pigs.

[bmaltais]

Meklort,

I used DellEFI instead of the CLI and that booted just fine. So maybe we should stick with the not everything in the kitchen sink approach for the final /Extra... Unless we can find what is causing this KP.

Just to give you folks following this thread an update here is where we are at:

Able to "Netbookify" a restored copy of OSX DVD on a USB stick. What this mean is that you will simply restore the OSX DVD to a 8GB+ USB Key then run anapplication called NetbookBootMaker.

Once the application has done a few things like puting a boot loader, creating an extension cache including custom kext, etc you will be able to boot with it.

Once booted the installation will proceed just like on a real Mac. At the end the all to familiar Fail error message will show up... but the magic already happened behind the scene. Simply click restart, take the USB key out and boot to OSX on your Mini 9 (or Lenovo S10).

At that point you may elect to apply a Combo patch or upgrade to 10.5.7. Obviously going from a 10.5.0 install to 10.5.7 need a special -x flag at boot to make thing display right until you can run "NetbookInstaller" which will replace the trusty DellEFI application.

NetbookInstaller will do similar things as DellEFI and will allow you to boot to a fully functional 10.5.7 system.

Right now we are strugling with NetbookInstaller... but considering all we have done I think we are quite far ahead!