Building a Hackintosh

This week a wanted to share a project that I started playing with a few months ago, and am planning on re-visiting soon – Installing OS X on my Acer Aspire One Netbook. I got this little Netbook almost a year ago now, and have enjoyed it ever since. I Love it, and I now carry this little marvel around with me everywhere I go. It's great for work too. Now I can check email or remote into my server from anywhere without having to carry around a, now giant, 15 inch, six pound laptop.

This Netbook came preloaded with Windows XP Home... BORING! It lasted almost week. I soon had XP Pro and the latest release of Ubuntu dual booting. I was surprised how fast this little laptop ran. It's truly amazing.

I have seen a lot about getting OS X installed on Netbooks on the Internet lately. It seems that they actually run really well. I thought this might be an awesome project to try. Also, there's one thing that you need to know about me. I have a HUGE crush on OS X. I think it's beautiful, and have made every computer I use look as much like OS X as I can. (Mac4Lin on Linux, Flyakiteosx for Windows)

So as usual, I consulted Google and soon found www.aspireoneuser.com. This site has all kinds of information on my particular brand of Netbook, and also has forums and guides containing instructions on installing this forbidden OS on to non-apple hardware.

What doesn't work

There were a few issues, and this was not a perfect install. Firstly, the wireless networking was not going to work. Many have tried, and all have failed to find a way to get the native (Atheros) wifi card to work with OS X. If I wanted to have wifi working, I was going to have to replace it with an OS X friendly one. Luckily finding a wifi card that would work was easy. Apparently the Dell DW 1390 and 1490 cards work without any additional drivers or setup. All I had to do was remove the old card and install the new one.

Secondly, there is no working suspend functionality for this hackintosh. Suspending this computer will drop the OS into a grey screen of death, requiring a reboot and a permission repair, just to keep things running smoothly.

Also, at that time, you could not run a native Apple update without killing the OS and leaving you with a Kernel Panic.

At this point, I can live without suspend and apple updates if everything else still worked. So the project was still a go. I just needed to order a new wifi card and install OS X.

Prepping for Surgery

Now, normally I would have no issue removing and installing a new network card, however, I've always been afraid to muck around in a laptop. I could easily swap out RAM or a Hard Drive, but beyond that was more than I have been willing to do, until now. My fear is not really in the taking apart, per-say, but in the ART of reassembly. These systems are all proprietary and the screws are CRAZY tiny! To make matters worse, this was a Netbook. It weighs in at about two pounds and is half the size of a regular laptop.

I love the Internet. I say this almost everyday, and it's still true. I found several YouTube videos detailing exactly how to open up and replace the existing wifi card.

I was also able to find used Dell DW 1390 card on Ebay for $12. In a week it arrived and I was sitting, prepped for surgery, next to my half gutted Netbook.

It was actually quite painless and in about 30 minutes, it was installed and working in XP.

Now, I had also ordered a one gig so-dimm to upgrade the RAM in my Netbook to 1.5 gigs. I thought that I would do this while I had my Aspire One opened up. However the process required to upgrade the RAM was far more involved than the wifi surgery had been.

Even with How-To videos, I didn't feel comfortable taking the entire computer apart. Really, who designs a RAM slot under the motherboard and requires you to remove the keyboard, track-pad, outer plastic casing, heat-shield, display cabling, hard drive, Wifi Card, a daughter-board, and the freaking motherboard just to access the RAM slot!!! CRAZY!!!

Installing OS X

Once the surgery was done, I was ready to start the install. I have a Mac Mini, and I do have a copy of OS X Leopard that I would love to just install straight onto my Netbook. But Apple just won't let that happen. So I had to resort to “Finding” a copy that had been patched to work on a regular PC.

I choose the iAtkos distribution of OS X to install, mostly because there was a list of after install tweaks listed on the Aspire One User Forum for this particular install.

The install went smoothly and there were no issues. I went through the list of tweaks and I could boot and run my new OS X system perfectly. Even the Web-cam worked right out of the box. I have to admit that not being able to just close up my Netbook and have it suspend was more of a nuisance than I thought it would be.

In Conclusion

I kept OS X installed for about a month. I usually change the OS after a month or so on this Netbook. There are so many new and exciting OS flavors to try that I can't just pick one and leave it. I can't wait to tell you how well Windows 7 works! But that's for another time.

Related Links

Aspire One User
www.aspireoneuser.com

Aspire One Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_Aspire_One

iAtkos Site
http://iatkos.wikidot.com/

Antique Radio Jukebox – Part 1

This week I wanted to talk about a new project that I am in the early stages of working on. After I completed my arcade machine I found that I really enjoyed using it as a jukebox. The software was very easy to use and really gave a nice jukebox experience. It occurred to me that It would not be much more difficult to build an actual jukebox than it was to build an arcade machine.

While researching jukeboxes and old radio cabinets, I found that I was really drawn to the older, classic looking designs. The older cabinets from the 30's and 40's had so much style and design built into them.

The idea is to have my jukebox look just like one of these old jukeboxes, but inside I would of course have a computer and about 20 thousand available songs!

I thought that I could probably find an antique jukebox or radio cabinet for this project. However I did not want to destroy a classic antique, so I began to look for an old cabinet that was beyond restoration.

I managed to find an old radio cabinet that would work perfectly for this project. It is a Philco model 37-610. This radio cabinet was built in 1937! This was a 5 tube radio that did not work at all. It was missing some knobs and the tubes were dead. I managed to buy it from a collector who let me have it for $20!

So this is basically where I am with this project. I am going to try and restore the cabinet itself as best I can. This will take quite a bit of work as even the laminate is pealing off in a few places. I am planning to modify the look of it as well. At first I felt like I should not do anything too drastic to change it's appearance. It's kind of scary to start hacking away at a 72 year old piece of history. But I soon realized that I bought in in such rough shape, I shouldn't feel too bad about changing it. (I'm still fighting with this one, but I've made up my mind).

I still need to actually figure out how this radio will work as a jukebox. It's easy enough to fit a computer and a sound system in the cabinet, but I am not sure how to set up the user interface yet. Some ideas right now include having an LCD screen rise up from the top or back. I have also been thinking about using a 10” touch screen laying flat on the top surface.

The plan right now is to have it look as close as possible to original, but work as a modern jukebox.

I'll keep you updated on my progress as I move forward on this project.

Related Links

Philco Radio Gallery
http://www.philcoradio.com/gallery/1937a.htm

Arcade Cabinet - MAME Cab

This week I wanted to share one of the biggest and most challenging projects I have completed to date. I'm not really sure when or how this project actually formed in my mind. It just sort of popped in my head one day that it would be really cool to have my very own arcade machine to play with any time I wanted.

I was born in the 70's, so that means that I spent a good part of my childhood at the local arcade. I used to pour quarters into the Galaga machine, trying to see just how many little alien ships I could blast away. Unfortunately I never had enough quarters to get very far.

So, as it seems that I can never quite satisfy my feelings of nostalgia, I set about looking for any and all information I could find about building an arcade machine. Around this same time I had a conversation with a friend about how he would love to have his own arcade machine as well. It seems that for him, Centipede was the game that he had spent his youth trying to beat. I told him that I was thinking about building an arcade machine and that it would probably not be too much harder to build two machines instead of just one. This would also serve as a strong motivating force to get this project started and completed, as I now had one paying customer.

As it turned out, I was only able to build one machine, due to space and time constraints. So I built a complete arcade cabinet for my friend to satisfy his Centipede cravings. In the end I learned a lot from building that first cabinet. The most important thing was that I would NEVER build in a trackball again. The precision needed to build it into the control board was very difficult, and I spent way too much time trying to get it perfect.

A few months down the road I got married and moved into a bigger house. I now had two important things – more room to build my arcade machines, and a new wife who was still glowing from having just been married, and who was not yet used to putting the kibosh on my larger - aka more expensive -projects.

So I started again, this time, with experience under my belt, and another friend who wanted his own arcade machine as well. Thanks for the extra motivation Bry!

Researching MAME Cabinets

A quick search of Google led me to a huge community of people who were planning and building their own arcade machines. MAME was the software that would allow me to run all the arcade classics as well as some of the newer games.

I also found the perfect front-end software that I could use to interface with the MAME software – Ultrastyle. This software allows me to display a spinning cube with screen shots that I could scroll through to find whatever game my heart desired. I just needed some game Roms. This was easy, Rom World had 100s available to download. Now all I had to do was configure all the software and I could start reliving my childhood and the best part – NO QUARTERS!!!

Planning the cabinet build

At this point I could play these arcade classics on my computer and it looked great, but I wanted a truer experience. I wanted to stand in front of a full size arcade machine. After looking around at some of the cabinets that others had made, I decided to model my machine on the traditional Defender cabinet.

I drew up my plans and headed for Home Depot. Ahhh, my home away from home. I could spend an entire day just walking around Home Depot, looking at tools and home renovation supplies, and of course the smell of all that wood. It just smells so good there. Anyway, I picked up a few 4 x 8 foot sheets of ¾ inch particle board. This would allow me to build the bulk of the cabinet. I also picked up some 2 x 3's and 2 x 2's. These would serve as the frame for my cabinet. There were also a variety of assorted parts and wood that went into building these cabinets, far too many to go into detail here. Needless to say I made many trips to Home Depot before I finished.

Building my Arcade Cabinet

It took about five months to build the first cabinet. The next two I built together, and only took about three months to complete . I ordered T-Molding for all the edges. This really gives the cabinets the true arcade look and feel. I ordered the buttons, joysticks and a track ball from X-Arcade. They do sell an already completed control board, but I opted to build my own.

The thing with this kind of project is that you are never really done. There are always upgrades and little things that you can do to make it even better. I finished the majority of this project about two years ago, but I still have some plans about what to add to it next.

I've added a “Show-Off” mode to my cabinet. Two 10 inch sticks of green automotive neon lighting that are powered directly from the computers power supply. They light up the chrome diamond plate kick plate and the back wall with the flip of a switch located on the top of the cabinet. I also have plans to add a couple USB ports to the front of the cabinet so I can plug in a Guitar Hero guitar or a DDR mat.



Jukebox mode

I've also decided to use my arcade machine as a jukebox as well. It seems like a common thing that a lot of MAME cabinet makers do, and there is a lot of software to pull off this neat trick. I added a wireless nic card and shared the music folder that the jukebox software accesses. Now I can wirelessly add or change the music available to the software (WinCab). Very cool bonus project!


Related Links

Galaga Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaga

Centipede Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_(video_game)

UltraStyle
http://ultrastyle.mameworld.info/

ROM World
http://www.rom-world.com/dl.php?name=MAME

Defender Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_(arcade_game)

T-Molding
http://www.t-molding.com/store/home.php

X-Arcade
http://www.xgaming.com/

DW Jukebox
http://dwjukebox.com/

MAME World
http://mameworld.info/

Motherboard Wall Art Project

Today I want to share with you a tech-art project that I put together last year. The idea came to me as I was checking the time on a tech-art project from years ago. Back then I thought it would be a neat idea to make a clock from an old printed circuit board that I had removed from a dot-matrix printer.

With that project, I first removed all the larger capacitors and anything else that might get in the way of the clock hands. I then drilled a hole in the centre of the 8 x 10 inch board and mounted a standard clock motor through it. It turned out looking pretty nice, and I still have that clock hanging on my office wall at work.

For this new project, I was considering what to do with all the old computers that had been slowly filling up my basement. Years ago I had thought about building a Beowulf cluster from 486 PCs. This was at a time when P3s were common and Windows 98SE was the OS of choice. Needless to say, these old clunkers were pretty much useless now, and served little more than paper weights taking up space. My hopes of building a cheap super computer that would one day help me take over the world will have to wait.

The idea came to me that it would make an especially geeky wall hanging if I had some old motherboards mounted on a frame and hanging over my computer desk - as a kind of homage to days gone by. Most of these computer were salvaged from the trash, and from family members who were going to throw them out. A couple of these computers were actually my everyday computer at some point in time, so it would be nostalgic to be able to look up and see them hanging on the wall above me.

It took a little time, but I eventually removed all twelve motherboards from their cases. I also removed all the cards and the slot processors from the P2's. I decided to leave as much ram as I could. Anything that I couldn't use in other systems would stay.

I then build a frame from 1 x 2 inch pine and used a thin piece of plywood as a surface to mount the motherboards to. The wood frame would attach to the plywood and act as support to let me hang it up when done.

I then arranged the motherboards so they would fit as neatly as I could, and proceeded to drill through the original mounting holes in the motherboards right through the plywood. Now I could use small bolts to mount the boards to the plywood.

You can see from the finished photo that it takes up quite a bit of space up on the wall. It also is surprisingly heavy! I really had to be careful how I mounted it to the wall, so it would not fall and kill me, or worse my computer!

Now when I feel like a trip down memory lane, I can look up and see my old first generation Pentium 60 (The one with the floating point calculation error built in). I can also see my old PII-266. This is the computer that I learned how to over-clock on. I had it running at 333MHz.

Ahh, the good old days...

Switching to Ubuntu – for good this time.

Today I made the switch, again! I have been using windows XP pro for more than 5 years, and I can say with confidence, that I know how to use it. I know where all the buttons and settings are, I even know how to play with my boot.ini file to manipulate my dual boot settings. I consider myself a windows user, that is, until today.

I have just finished tweaking the last setting on my almost 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop. When I got this laptop, it came supplied with Microsoft's Windows Media Center edition pre-installed. It also came with about a hundred other applications that Dell decided I needed to have. Most of it was junk, and only served to frustrate me as I tried to navigate through the myriad of clicks and pop-up windows.

At that time I heard of a new Linux distribution that everyone was talking about - Ubuntu, Linux for Human Beings. The latest release then was Dapper Drake 6.06 and I had just received my FREE CD from Canonical, the commercial sponsor for this distro. Ubuntu was not a brand new Linux distribution at that time, it had been around for a while and was now starting to really gain a foot-hold with adventurous window users like myself.

For the most part, everything went fine. I went through the install and nuked windows while I was at it. It's not hard to re-install an OS and I was not really happy with my pre-install anyway, so it was worth the risk. I played with dapper for about a week. During that time I had to drop to the command line more than a few times, which was actually painless. But in the end I just didn't get what I wanted out of Ubuntu. I switched back to Windows.

With the next release of Ubuntu, Edgy Eft, I gave it another try. This time, it didn't go so well. No wireless, and my video card was not working at all. I have an ATI x1400 video card, and at first it would only boot to the command line. I played with the settings, and scrolled through the forums to solve these problems. But I still wasn't happy, and I switched back to Windows again.

This back and forth has gone on since then. With every new release of Ubuntu, comes another go-at-it. But today is finally the day I switch for good!

I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, and it is amazing! There were still a few issues, but a quick Google fixed everything. This is how I did it...

First things first, my hardware:

Dell Inspiron 9400 (Core Duo T2600 processor 2.16GHz) Centrino
1.5GB RAM
Intel 945PM Motherboard chipset
100GB hard drive
SD Card Reader
DVD DL writer
6 x USB2.0
Firewire,
RJ45 (LAN) 10/100
RJ11 (modem) 56K data/fax
VGA, DVI, S-Video output
Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG Wifi
17 inch TFT wide-screen display
ATI Radeon Mobility X1400
1920 x 1200 Max resolution

Installing Ubuntu

Download and boot from live Ubuntu 9.04 CD. Note: Ubuntu includes the Wubi installer, which actually lets you install Ubuntu from within your windows environment. I have used it in the past, and it works great. In this case, I have decided to get rid of windows all-together.

Get Ubuntu here: http://www.ubuntu.com/

Once the Ubuntu desktop is running, double click on the install icon. There are a series of screen that for the most part you can click through. You will want to pay attention to the partitioning screen. This is where you must decide how you want to split up your hard drive. I've heard that it is a good idea to setup a separate partition for the /home folder, that way if you re-install Ubuntu again later you won't loose any user files.

Losing the Brown and Orange

When the install is complete, you will be given the option to remove the CD and reboot. When the computer reboots, you will be looking at a fresh install of Ubuntu. Ya, I know, brown... yuck!

For some reason, Ubuntu's designers, some time ago, decided that brown was their colour. I don't know why they choose brown, which is arguably the most unexciting, plain, boring colour in the entire colour pallet, but they did.

Fortunately, if you are as un-enamored with the shades of brown and orange of Ubuntu's default Gnome (the default window manager) interface as I am, it is very easy to customize. The appearance of your GUI can be changed from the System → Preferences → Appearance menu. This is a good start, but for me I've found something better!

I have always loved the look and feel of Apple's OS X operating system. It just looks so pretty. For me, I'm all about the eye candy. I want my computer to look beautiful. And OS X looks simple stunning. While a windows user, I would employ an OS transformation package to make my boring XP desktop look like OS X. It was an application called “FlyaKiteOSX”. Strange name for an app, but it worked great! So I set out to find the same thing for my new brown Ubuntu system. After several Google searches, I found my answer.

Mac4Lin is a sourceforge project that let's you completely change the look of Gnome, to look like OS X. And with the addition of the Avant-Window-Navigator, and removing the lower panel, I have to say I am impressed with the look of this OS X clone.

Get Mac4Lin here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin

Fixing Wifi problem

With this particular laptop I did have a problem getting the wireless to work correctly. The network manager did not display any wireless networks, and I was not sure that my network card was even detected. I ran the following command in terminal;

lspci -v | less

This displayed all the devices in my computer, including my wireless card. So I knew that Ubuntu knew it was there. After another Google search I found a suggestion to remove the existing Network manager and install a new one.

I ran the following commands in terminal.

sudo apt-get install wicd

This placed the Wicd App under Applications → Internet menu. From there I could see my wireless network and connect to it.

The finished product

You can see from my screen shot that Mac4Lin really does a nice job making the Gnome desktop look like OS X. It also change the minimize, maximize, and close buttons to the left side of open windows. I've turned on the extra visual effects as well. So I have wobbly windows. I've also setup an effect very much like OS X's expose by going into the Window Management --> Scale in the CompizConfig Settings Manager and making sure it was enabled. I set mine to trigger when my mouse hits the top right corner of my screen.

I'm very happy with my Linux system right now. It was easy to get everything setup and working, thanks to Google. If you have any questions, let me know.

Welcome to my Blog!

Welcome to my blog. I have spent many years working on projects, taking things apart, and generally hacking the heck out of anything I could get my hands on. I like to learn how things work, and see what else they can do.

I have decided to put this blog together to act as both a source for those looking to learn how to do something that I might have already done, and as inspiration for those thinking about doing something, but not sure how or what to do.

I hope you find it both educational and inspirational.