25 February 2010

High Ambitions No More

It is undoubtedly every HP Mini 311 owner wishes to be able to use their stock WiFi cards under Mac OS X. It's a given that Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.5 doesn't have any problems with granting that wish and Leopard could've been a viable and logical option on the Mini 311 as a staple Ion netbook hackintosh if only a bit of development effort from the Snow Leopard endeavor (which chooses to dance around the wifi issue by replacing the stock card with a compatible one) where directed to it.
But as we say in French: Pas de bol, mec. Vraiment pas.
So we're left with no audio, no Quartz Extreme (graphics acceleration) for the Mini 311 under Leo. If you attempted to boot into Leopard on the 311, your only consolation would be to finally see that WiFi icon on the menubar enabled with the proper Leopard system version and/or some added kexts or edits to IO80211Family.kext's info.plist.
Snow Leopard works beautifully as it does in the present times thanks to the wonderful DSDT work. Unfortunately, the hacks on that wouldn't enable even Quartz Extreme when I experimented with Leopard on my Mini 311. Most of the times I was given but pestering and consistent 2 choices: a kernel panic or back to square 1 with no everything-that-makes-a-hackintosh-a-worthwhile-hackintosh.
I tried thebubzie's approach and thought I hit gold. Well, there was once that I was able to log into my Snow Leopard On Top of Leopard installation (with no QE, no sound, no everything else), I checked and saw that both my WiFi cards - remember that I use the stock on the spare full-height pci slot for bluetooth - were merrily a-lit! It should be working. But I couldn't make anything else work so I quit and for the want of usable hackintosh for my everyday needs, I wiped out that Snow Leopard On Top of Leopard install from my hard drive and started anew.
And then some weeks ago, I attempted again to replicate that happy incident only to end up utterly and painfully (sleepless nights wreaked zit havoc on poor face) disappointed and not to mention, ugly. Now I'm seriously thinking that I was only imagining things - which is a perfectly valid premise: it could have been that, since the Snow Leopard compatible BCM94312HMG card from the HP Mini 1001TU was also installed along with the 311's stock combo BCM4312HMGB, it may have muddled up how Network displayed my uh, for lack of better words, network settings.
In summary, there's only one way to get the stock Mini 311 WiFi card to work: Mac OS X Leopard.

3 comments:

Tev said...

Hii LeMaurien,

Would it be possible to install Mac OS X Leopard on the 311c?

Im a bit confused if you already did this or not?

I would be satisfied with Leopard over Snow Leopard if my WiFi works (and all the other stuff :P)

Keep up the good work!

Tev

Grid said...

Leopard can be installed on the 311. It's usable to some extent:
1) no Quartz Extreme - can't watch vids, user interface performance is sloppy to say the least.
2) no audio

It should be possible to make Leopard work at "optimum" levels as Snow Leopard does only there's little motivation to do so because an alternative solution exists: replacing the WiFi card.

Now compare shelling out $20 or so to sleepless nights and lots of headache over resolving the 2 issues mentioned above (not easy, I've been there); my limited knowledge and patience got the better of me.

Leopard would be so wonderful, but the fight is hard and even hopeless since it's a lonely one :-(

Tev said...

Yep I def agree with you. Hmm, maybe I will just buy the WiFi card or switch to Ubuntu Netbook Edition oooeps lol