Mod Season P1: Hacksemite Thinkpad

Software & Operating Systems Mac
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Its mod season! Whats mod season? In fall, when HS starts for students, college students are starting classes, and people get more involved with life, I love to bash out some projects that are either unfinished, or just need to be done to save me time.

Now, y’all know I’m nuts. Let me explain my situation. I got a thinkpad L520 for my birthday this year. I needed a laptop that was serviceable, had battery life over an hour at least, and wasn’t a fucking turd like every other laptop in the modern market. So rather than buying a used macbook what like would have made more sense, I researched some about this laptop and got it. It has a really nice i5 2520M, HD3000 (which is enough GPU for me, its basically the same power as an nv 9800), threw some ram in from my Y40-70 (while yes a better laptop hardware wise, things started randomly dying no the mobo so the KB assembly doesn’t work, screen flicker, ech barf) so it has a good 12GB at 1600MHZ, and a 1TB SSHD.

“Ok great IDC I’m going back to the lounge”

Well, heres the thing. I am based completely on my desktop now. I WOULD run a linux on a laptop if I cared about keeping it up to date, but I am so insane about being up to date on the kernel, and package managers and… stuff… It would drive me insane to keep it up to date when I don’t use it. So I tried Slackware. Nope. Ubuntu, theres shit missing and I hate apt-get. Do you see where I’m going here? More than likely.

So since I got the machine in July I have been plotting OSX to go on it and have done it. Though, it can only run Yosemite.

“So great, you did it, whats the point?”

Well, theres no official post seemingly anywhere on the net about hackintoshing this. I don’t have the resources ATM but I want to write the process down and build it from scratch. This was done using a niresh distro. I actually haven’t had problems with these before, but as with the warez rules I can’t recommend that YOU use them. Nor link the ISO’s. Find that yourself. But if you have questions, feel free to PM me. But if you do use it, do whatever the hell you want. I’m not accepting responsibility :stuck_out_tongue:

Theres many other projects like this that I am spiking up that I need documented and want to share. More, on this specifically, soon, as in within the next week.

Actually I’ll just edit in the later post rather than throw on another post. Just so everything is concise.

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That’s an awesome project man, I’ve been thinking about looking into either Hackintoshing my laptop or my desktop, so I’ll probably be coming to you with questions. It looks nice though! Would you recommend someone purchasing a laptop like that and Hackintoshing it, or do you think buying an older 15" MBP matte screen from macofalltrades.com would be a better solution? Thanks for the post again, always love your projects!

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Aww man I wanna cry.

But uhh, IDK. Good question. Really depends on what you want to do and what you feel comfy running for hardware and OS. For example: Mavericks runs flawlessly on an Asus G50V. Bonus to that is Mav only wants the Mobo requirements to match, so you can put just about any compatible GPU in, you can do a core 2 quad extreme, hack the bios for a 6GB ram mod (not going to bother with that on mine :stuck_out_tongue: ) you can have 3 hard disks… Its nuts. But you can do a lot with near nothing and a laptop you might scrap and scrap parts for it. For my purposes I just need OSX because I hate updates but I’m addicted to the latest linux kernel. So, I do this to laptops. And no, by no means is it stable and depending on how you even do it is it legal. With Niresh stuff you’re pirating OSX as it is, so for me getting the info I need off of the Niresh disk and doing it all from a fresh hand made install is what I would prefer.

As a daily? I don’t care if theres hiccups. I’m used to that stuff. But if you had a driver problem or maybe your display got locked to 800X600 for some reason that might be an issue if you don’t know how to break the OS to make it work correctly. Hackintoshing can be VERY unpredictable in its bugs and problems. So with that, I’m not really going to give you a yes or no answer. Really its up to you with how much you wanna jump into the pool.

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I completely understand that, and honestly breaking things is a joy of mine, what’s the point of owning technology if not to break it you know? I used to play a lot of games that couldn’t be ported over to Linux which is why I’m now looking into a Hackintosh, because I’ve always wanted to do so, I’ve just never had the opportunity of doing it. I’ll have to message you and get some more info on the OS and the most common problems you run into, unless of course you’d like to share that here! Seriously man thanks for the in-depth reply, it’s always a joy to learn more about these types of projects!

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I’m eventually just going to make a general FAQ. Send me questions because I’m back on an Apple kick and that’ll probably be the next big post after this and my childhood PC rebuild.

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Breaking stuff is my jam! Sometimes, I don’t have working systems for days! probably not something I should be proud of…
Looking to make my new Lenovo yoga 720 into a hackbook just for teh lulz. I’d never use it like that but, why not!

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Really? What’s that all about, I want to know!

Jokes aside that’s a really well done project. Does everything works (hardware and software wise) and it’s stable?

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Yeah theres general hardware drivers and everything. No wifi yet but I can get an apple wifi chip and chuck it in there. Just need to find one.

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I’m going out to find wifi chips and other stuff. Since this is sorta a build log I guess I’ll report back here. Does anyone want benchmarks.

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Well that’s just a silly question now isn’t it?!

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IDK some people don’t like them (like me). I just don’t have any benchmarks made for OSX that could really apply.

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Ah I see, well if you’re able to put some out, I’d be pretty appreciative about it, since I like to know the comparison of an Apple machine with similar specs.

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I’ll do some geekbench stuff later today. :3

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Ech.

Wifi card get, damn painful though. GB3 benches coming here in a little bit.

Edit: This is proving to be a bit difficult…

Right. Well I’m now having problems with the bugs inherent to the Niresh distro. Its actually causing power problems and the networking stack is completely broken, as it turns out. Kexts don’t correctly load, and occasionally when Wifi does work it auto-sleeps the computer. As stated earlier in the thread, there are a lot of bugs in these sort of pre-made distros. So, the next step here is to build my own “distro” of OSX. I’ll show step by step how to do this from either my mac pro or my imac. Can’t do that at the moment as I don’t have a yosemite image available, but thats whats next.

I know I said I would show benchmarks, so I’ll just say its about the same as the 2013 MBP with no DGPU.

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@WolfTech716

Since you’re going to attack this soon it seems I thought it might be helpful to throw some info at you that I just noticed on how OSX works when you’re installing, specifically for networking, but IDK it might be helpful later on.

Ok so I have another hackintosh laptop and I use Mavericks on it. Got a wifi card for it, all that jazz. If you set up on a laptop with a wifi card out of another mac (yes it works, I highly recommend doing that actually) make sure you have it in the machine you are using when you install. Don’t stagger it and add it later. Specifically here with mine, I tried to install it last night and it wouldn’t configure properly or anything. Wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t do shit. But if you plan on adding a wifi card and a kext later on, do as you wish at that point. Just do your research on that first. And obviously if you get USB one that is mac compatible, tada there you go.

Also, for anyone else looking into how this stuff works or starting off for the first time, bootup is a bit scary. It may seem like it has frozen or something but it just takes a while. Basically, OSX loads the installer, runtime environment, and some packages into ram, then unpacks them. Its not the fastest possible because it is staged like that so keep that in mind. It shtouldn’t take 20 minutes to get in but if its more than 5-10 you should probably remake your USB.

More to come. Getting a Yosemite disc from walmart today, and if I can a Mavericks. Both are 10 bucks. (don’t pirate OSX its a pain in the ass anyways).

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Change of plans. Can’t buy a USB or disk of OSX from the apple store anymore because they’re fucking retarded, and I want to use Mavericks anyways, so I’m going to look for a Mavs disk online that I can buy or just “acquire” one, whether from a friend or by other means.

Stay tuned though, this will happen eventually :T

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I had the same problem with an old iMac I got my hands on not too long ago. 2008 iMacs only support up to 10.11, and unless it was already “purchased” cannot be downloaded on anything newer…

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Sorry, I stumbled on it when I was forced to explore the hacks for installing 10.12 on “older” Macs. Didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, removed it though.

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Thanks! Not a problem, just trying to keep it all safe here (though you have saved me money).

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Got a Yosemite Image and Mavericks image that both clear and verify perfectly. Side bonus is a potential post about 10.9 on a first get intel imac.

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