With the latest Mac OSX update for Snow Leopard, v10.6.2, Intel Atom processors were no longer supported. This has consequences for a lot of Hackintoshers who installed Mac OSX on their netbooks using the hackintosh kernel-mod. But it took no longer than 2 weeks before the restrictive work of Apple was undone by a new hack of Mac OSX’s Darwin kernel.

The Mac OSX 10.6.2 Atom restriction came in the knowledge that Mac OSX shouldn’t normally run on Atom processors. So with the update Apple shut down netbook users from the latest Mac OSX update. Who updated his hackintosh installation to v10.6.2 was no longer able to boot.

But a russian hacker known as “tea” has released another upgrade of the 32-bits mach_kernel for Mac OSX 10.6.2 among the OSx86. This means that all owners of netbooks and nettops with an atom processor will once again enjoy their favorite hacked OS.

Hackintoshers can now download the new hacked kernel and get it up and running with some terminal work. Nothing for the normal home-user, but hackintosh users should manage to update without many problems.

Atom can rock on with Mac OSX 10.6.2 kernel mod is a post from: The Apple Bites

Tags:

• atom
• mach_atom_kernel
• mac kernel modifikation
• mac kernel mods
• mach kernel atom

According to many sources, Apple is busy building the next major version of Mac OSX, namely mac OSX 10.7. Or according to a bug report analyzed by MacRumors, Mac OSX “11A47″.

MacRumors discovered that a new build reference was found in the buglist for the opensource OSX component “launchd”, this build reference “11A47″ should point to Mac OSX 10.7. Since Mac OSX 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is referenced to as “10A432″ where the first number is the most important. This number points to the major version.

So you can already be sure of one update, “launchd” which manages the processes on OSX, will get a bugfix. Other updates in version 10.7 are up to this date unknown. But as Snow Leopard was only a small under-the-hood update, we have reason to believe that Mac OSX 10.7 will bring major changes. One of them could be dramatic performance increases which benefit from the new technologies build into Snow Leopard such as e.g. Grand Central Dispatch and 64-bits. This also lightens the way for remarkable changes to the user interface of Mac OSX, such as more advanced desktop effects, faster reactions, …

But as Mac OSX uses more advanced hardware technologies older Macs will no longer be supported. At this point this may as well be the older white polycarbonate macbooks (prior to 2009) which are quite short on the graphical power. But of course these are assumptions. If we want to know what the next OSX will truly bring, we’ll have to wait for the release presentation. Since Apple can keep things in doors for quite a long time, all we can do is speculate.

So a few questions still remain and many of the above statements are still very uncertain. The biggest but probably most useless question is : What will be the codename for the new OSX?
Well according to us this can be none other than Mac OSX “Lion” as all other big cats which Apple uses for their OS codenames are already used.

Mac OSX 10.0 : Cheetah
Mac OSX 10.1 : Puma
Mac OSX 10.2 : Jaguar
Mac OSX 10.3 : Panther
Mac OSX 10.4 : Tiger
Mac OSX 10.5 : Leopard
Mac OSX 10.6 : Snow Leopard
Mac OSX 10.7 : Lion?

But for confirmation of all our suspicions we’ll have to wait until Apple presents Mac OSX 10.7 to the public.

Mac OSX 10.7, “Lion”? is a post from: The Apple Bites

Tags:

• launchd lion
• lion launchd
• launchd mac lion
• Apple Lion launchctl
• Lion launchctl
• launchd on lion
• launchd and lion
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• os x lion launchctl
• namely mac os x 10 2

With the release of the OS X Snow Leopard 10A402 beta yesterday, users have been poring over the new version looking for changes. Among the most obvious changes have been a few visual tweaks, although several other enhancements have also been discovered.

- Contextual Dock Menus in List View: Apple has modified the theme of contextual menus within the Dock when using list view. The menus now utilize what some users are calling a “heads-up display” theme of white text on a charcoal background.

- Finder Window Slider Button: The new-in-Snow Leopard Finder window slider button for adjusting icon sizes has now taken on a grey color as opposed to the standard blue buttons found elsewhere.

- Exposé for Multiple Monitors Fixed: Exposé reportedly now functions correctly when using multiple monitors, with windows remaining on their respective monitors in Exposé rather than all being collected on the primary monitor.

- System Responsiveness and Speed: Many users are reporting greater system responsiveness and significant increases in speed. Startup and shutdown times appear to be significantly improved.

- Third-Party Preference Panes: Third-party System Preferences panes reportedly are now functional.

- Battery Life for Notebooks: A number of users have reported their battery life indicators estimating significantly longer run times than under previous Snow Leopard builds. This has not, however, been confirmed in actual battery life tests yet.

- New QuickTime Version: QuickTime X has been upgraded to Build 10.0 (42). There is no word on any visible changes in the new build.

OS X Snow Leopard 10A402 Updates is a post from: The Apple Bites