Mhackintosh blog

I have two ExpressCard/34 eSATA controllers for my MacBook Pro, one with the Micron JMB362 chipset, the other with SIS3132. Only the SIS3132 is recognized on Leopard 10.5, albeit JMicron pretend to support 10.4.x and 10.5.

Worse with Leopard, none is recognized, and the SiS drivers seems to crash the MacBook Pro every time the card is plugged or unplugged! Maybe it’s related to the fact that I have 4GB RAM?!?

Anyway, some hardware doesn’t work anymore with Snow Leopard, even the one that are really of widepsread use (SiS 3132 is on ExpressCard/34, PCI-express SATA cards for PC and MacPro, …)

There’s a bug in Snow Leopard install, when you launch it from the finder.

The process is well done, you could install booting from the DVD or even from the Leopard Desktop, with a great interface, and consumer oriented options (while leaving IT ppl control over the process!).

But if you launch from the desktop, the reboot is not clean and some applications are stopped “brutally”, as MAMP (Mac Apache MySQL PHP), so on the next reboot you will have it not working

The better is to boot from DVD and install from tat (press the <alt> key  while starting your mac!)!

This week-end I have homework!

I installed Snow Leopard on my old MacBook Pro 15″ before selling it on Craigs List, and everything seems to run just fine, except the SIS 3132 driver: the ExpressCard eSATA! reports there

As SIS 3132 is the most used ExpressCard eSATA chip, it is really annoying to loose the ability to connect my hard drives in eSATA on the old MacBook Pro, but a real problem on my new MacBook Pro 17″! Hope thy will fix it!

I plan to install Snow Leopard on my MBP 17″ thereafter and test OpenCL development using XCode today, OpenCL is a real exciting technology for software developer, if GPU and CPU are BOTH supported!

On the other hand, Grand Central doesn’t excite me, it’s targeted at developers that dont want to learn how to launch thread, do atomic operations, and so on. Problem still be there but they will learn a proprietary way to deal with instead doing it the right way : the portable POSIX way!

And I have to check my ACER M5620 to report it’s distro, BIOS settings, full configuration and loaded kEXT.

A great week-end

Apple maintain a Knowledge base of Snow Leopard 10.6 incompatible software. There’s an additional (long) list for Printers and Scanner supported on Snow Leopard too.

You’d probably better check it before any installation of Snow Leopard, and follow informations on eah software editor about their upgrade path or future compatible releases…

This is an happy day, the day Apple realy throw away the PowerPC compatibility to jump totally in the x86 bandwagon, leaving all these old processors in the dust…

Understand me, I liked my PowerPC Mac, from my first Mac Mini 1.25Ghz, but they where so slow compared to any PC of their time that it was like a joke when Apple talked about powerful mac, power mac, and so on…

So when Mac Intel appeared, they changed it all, being even faster with PowerPC emulated applications then regular PowerPC Mac, and quickly becoming 2X or 3X faster with native applications.

In fact, the domination of Intel chips are so obvious that the best PowerPC Mac, the PowerMac Quad 4×2.5Ghz is slower than some actual MacBook Pro notebooks with dual-core processors, on MacWorld’s SpeedMark 5 test suite, and could not be compared to any actual iMac!

When I swapped my PowerBook 15″ HD w/ PowerPC G4 1.67Ghz to a Black MacBook 2×2.0Ghz, it was like time machine, everything just happens NOW, no more waiting endlessly, no more sluggyness when editing images with Photoshop (or at least less frequently!), speedier interface.

As for the MC680×0 family, PowerPC family is part of the history of Apple and Macs, no more of its present