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Dell XPS 1340 under OSX 10.6, including boot-132 install cd

bcc9

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olegpronin
olegpronin
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Thanks!

 

The A14 version add the e-sata drives detection in the bios. That means we can finally boot up a system with an external sata drive plugged in this port.

 

I have tested it and the dtcection works, you have to activate a new function though: "ESATA GEN 1" or something like that.

 

How does this function work?

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bcc9
bcc9
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Thanks!

 

The A14 version add the e-sata drives detection in the bios. That means we can finally boot up a system with an external sata drive plugged in this port.

I've been using esata drives with this laptop for over a year now, so that description is not quite right.

I have tested it and the dtcection works, you have to activate a new function though: "ESATA GEN 1" or something like that.
Ah, the release note mumbled something about esata but didn't mention any new knob. So finally after a year of complaints they added a way to limit the esata connection to 1.5gbps from the controller side. Until now I had to only use disks that included a 1.5gbps jumper (the esata port with this chipset has always been flakey at 3gbps).
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bcc9
bcc9
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I've been using esata drives with this laptop for over a year now, so that description is not quite right.

Ah, the release note mumbled something about esata but didn't mention any new knob. So finally after a year of complaints they added a way to limit the esata connection to 1.5gbps from the controller side. Until now I had to only use disks that included a 1.5gbps jumper (the esata port with this chipset has always been flakey at 3gbps).

So the new bios esata knob works to allow 3gbps esata disks to attach at 1.5gbps under linux and windows7 (once you update the windows chipset driver), but no under OSX. Under OSX the driver still tries to use 3gbps and the disks hang. You'd think with all the problems macbook users have reported with sata at 3gbps there would be a driver config setting to limit drives to 1.5gbps by now, but no such luck.

 

So it looks like this enhancement in the new bios is pretty useless under OSX.

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Nokiac
Nokiac
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Ok guys.. I had this problem since a long time.. but affecting me more now as I am frequently dual booting...

 

When I boot Linux (Fedora 12) after using Snow Leopard (10.6.2), the system time is wrong..it seems to be set to GMT. I guessed it coz I am in GMT -7:00 time zone and it shows 7 hours ahead time (8pm instead of 1pm) .

 

So any way to fix this??

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olegpronin
olegpronin
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you can change GMT in Mac OS system by fake timezone, Mac OS just can't read time from bios.

 

Ok guys.. I had this problem since a long time.. but affecting me more now as I am frequently dual booting...

 

When I boot Linux (Fedora 12) after using Snow Leopard (10.6.2), the system time is wrong..it seems to be set to GMT. I guessed it coz I am in GMT -7:00 time zone and it shows 7 hours ahead time (8pm instead of 1pm) .

 

So any way to fix this??

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Atreidae
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Im sorry if this has been posted before but id figure id post my notes

I've just completed an install from a completely vanilla machine.

 

Keeping an MBR system can be a wee bit tricky if you dont already have a mac laying around.

 

Get your hands on a 10.6 dvd

Save the modified OSInstall file for the MBR version of the installer to either another USB key or your NTFS/FAT partition

Boot from it using the chemelion CDR in post one.

 

once in the installer kick off disk utility stuff your 8GB+ USB key into your 1340 and image it with either a DMG or use the DVD in the drive as a source

Once the image process is completed,

kick off a terminal window and navigate to the path of the file you need to replace (something like "cd /OSX Installer DVD/Volumes/Private/blahblah/A/" ) then copy the modified OSInstall to the USB stick.

 

Two things.

No: you cannot put the file onto the USB stick using Linux, when you image it it changes to XFS+ Journaled hence making it unwritable (in my 2.26 kernel anyway)

Watchout: Dont do what I did and get frustrated because you are trying to write to a "read only" filesystem when booted into the osx installer.... you are trying to write to the DVD! check the volume name and try again

 

Once thats done, reboot off the chemelion disc and use the USB key, you can now install using an MBR disk without a mac to image from :)

 

Hope this helps everyone, ill try the post up when i can figure out why my cursor doesnt work.

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bcc9
bcc9
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Ok guys.. I had this problem since a long time.. but affecting me more now as I am frequently dual booting...

 

When I boot Linux (Fedora 12) after using Snow Leopard (10.6.2), the system time is wrong..it seems to be set to GMT. I guessed it coz I am in GMT -7:00 time zone and it shows 7 hours ahead time (8pm instead of 1pm) .

 

So any way to fix this??

If you only care about those two oses it is easy - you simply configure linux to use a UTC system clock with system-config-date.

The harder situation is making windows&OSX agree on the system clock. Supposedly as of windows7 windows handles UTC via a registry change without adverse effects. (Unlike earlier versions of windows where there are side effects).

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bcc9
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So I've managed to patch the 10.6.3 AppleHDA such that it now works on this laptop with the HDAIDT extension.

The patch is to insert the IDT codec id into the binary where the driver is maintaining hardcoded lists of codecs.

Unpack, and place in /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHDA.kext/Contents/MacOS

Set ownership&permissions per usual, and touch /System/Library/Extensions

 

I'm noticing some "kTypePinComplex != fType" assertion messages but things seem to be fine otherwise. Would be nice if someone would look into those assertions for me (I'm getting pretty sick of maintaining AppleHDA as you can imagine ;)

 

Update 11/12/10: You should now just use my patch-hda program to patch AppleHDA on the fly. See post #1.

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hxh103
hxh103
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If you only care about those two oses it is easy - you simply configure linux to use a UTC system clock with system-config-date.

The harder situation is making windows&OSX agree on the system clock. Supposedly as of windows7 windows handles UTC via a registry change without adverse effects. (Unlike earlier versions of windows where there are side effects).

For those that are using windows 7 and osx like me, you can either schedule win7 to update time every time you boot or change the registry like bcc9 mentioned. 

 

To do this, you must create a registry in

 

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

 

Name = RealTimeIsUniversal

Type = Reg_DWORD

0 = RTC is Local Time

1 = RTC is UTC

 

I've used both methods and they both work. I prefer the registry method since it is one less thing my laptop has to do when it boots up, but some people don't like messing with registry.

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MrKalah
MrKalah
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So the new bios esata knob works to allow 3gbps esata disks to attach at 1.5gbps under linux and windows7 (once you update the windows chipset driver), but no under OSX. Under OSX the driver still tries to use 3gbps and the disks hang. You'd think with all the problems macbook users have reported with sata at 3gbps there would be a driver config setting to limit drives to 1.5gbps by now, but no such luck.

 

So it looks like this enhancement in the new bios is pretty useless under OSX.

 

I never had problems using 3gbps esata drives with OSX on my 1340, I just couldn't boot on them before the A14 bios version.

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bcc9
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I never had problems using 3gbps esata drives with OSX on my 1340, I just couldn't boot on them before the A14 bios version.
3gbps esata drives often work fine after negotiating down to 1.5gbps. Consider yourself very lucky if you've been able to transfer more than a few gigabytes at 3gbps without the speed being dropped down. Not everyone would notice problems, but, there is for example thousands of posts on such problems with this chipset on discussions.apple.com
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Guest
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Will it ever be possible to get microphone pre-gain? Also, is there a possiblity we can use VoodooHDA on this machine? I tried before but I got garbled sound. In my opinion VoodooHDA usually does a better job than AppleHDA. Thanks for any input you can give!

 

 

 

So I've managed to patch the 10.6.3 AppleHDA such that it now works on this laptop with the HDAIDT extension.

The patch is to insert the IDT codec id into the binary where the driver is maintaining hardcoded lists of codecs.

Unpack, and place in /System/Library/Extensions/AppleHDA.kext/Contents/MacOS

Set ownership&permissions per usual, and touch /System/Library/Extensions

 

I'm noticing some "kTypePinComplex != fType" assertion messages but things seem to be fine otherwise. Would be nice if someone would look into those assertions for me (I'm getting pretty sick of maintaining AppleHDA as you can imagine :D

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bcc9
bcc9
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Will it ever be possible to get microphone pre-gain?
If someone wants to put in enough effort, it should be possible. I'm not planning to work on it more.

Also, is there a possiblity we can use VoodooHDA on this machine? I tried before but I got garbled sound. In my opinion VoodooHDA usually does a better job than AppleHDA. Thanks for any input you can give!
Last I knew the audio distortion problem was still not understood or fixed, and things such as digital mics were not supported. You could try checking current voodoohda code and see if things have improved.

This bug fix:

http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6852870

http://hg.genunix.org/onnv-gate.hg/rev/3dbb42515756#l2

has the exact same symptoms so maybe that fix could be retrofitted into voodoohda.

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NightMiles
NightMiles
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Is anyone able to install Windows 7 using Parallels? Or let alone anything? It says I need to enable hardware virtualization, but it's already enabled in the BIOS.

 

Thanks.

 

I had the same problem. Go check your BIOS to make sure virtualization support is enabled. If you are using an old BIOS (I was at A07 when I first experimented with getting OS X on my 1340) you may want to upgrade. I upgraded to the latest version (A14) and haven't had any problems keeping virtualization support enabled.

 

Edit: I want to emphasize that you need to double-check that virtualization is enabled. In my case there were some times where I was absolutely sure it was enabled but it became disabled without any apparent reason.

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Nokiac
Nokiac
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A small note: WHen you change the virtualisation settings in BIOS, you need to "Cold Reboot" you CPU , ie shutdown completely and then start again for the settings to take effect. I learnt this when virtualbox in linux just would not show my CPU has VT-X enabled, even though I had set it so in BIOS and "warm rebooted" .

 

Also, for now as BCC9 said, I fixed my time woes by setting UTC system clock in fedora12. I dont care much about windows , but its a good tip to set UTC in my Win7 so that time is proper across all 3 OS.

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wtcnbrwndo4u
wtcnbrwndo4u
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Sounds good. I'll pop in the BIOS update soon. I'm running A11 currently.

 

EDIT: Wait, I can't run this update via DOS.... I have to install Windows 7 natively just so I can run it in a virtual machine. Oh, the irony.

Yeah, it's enabled. I've checked several times. On occasion, I get error 0251, which tells me the system CMOS checksum is bad/corrupted. This clears off the BIOS settings I had chosen, but regardless, I just made changed the setting, double-checked, booted into OSX, and tried Parallels to no avail.

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wtcnbrwndo4u
wtcnbrwndo4u
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A small note: WHen you change the virtualisation settings in BIOS, you need to "Cold Reboot" you CPU , ie shutdown completely and then start again for the settings to take effect. I learnt this when virtualbox in linux just would not show my CPU has VT-X enabled, even though I had set it so in BIOS and "warm rebooted" .

 

Also, for now as BCC9 said, I fixed my time woes by setting UTC system clock in fedora12. I dont care much about windows , but its a good tip to set UTC in my Win7 so that time is proper across all 3 OS.

Good call. I shut it down completely and it works fine. I still don't know about the checksum error.

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NightMiles
NightMiles
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I have to install Windows 7 natively just so I can run it in a virtual machine. Oh, the irony.

 

Yup, I had to do the same thing. The extra few hours of work paid off, though. I also was getting those corrupted BIOS errors you mentioned in a later post and this update fixed that too. Well worth the trouble for a smooth experience in OS X.

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