The Tech Loft

After updating to Lion 10.7.2, I immediatly noticed that the icons in my Launchpad had increased in sized…OVER sized actually. To me, the new icon size is just too big and ugly. And what pisses me off is that the icon size cannot be changed! If you don’t like the new icon size, there’s hope for you yet. A small hack, easy and simply can be applied to get your Launchpad icons back to 10.7 size. You’ll need to download the Dock app from 10.7 . After downloading the Dock app to your desktop, run this command in Terminal: cd to the directory where file is located chmod 755 Dock Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/, rename Dock to ‘Original Dock’, and place Dock in the folder. Open Terminal, run ‘Killall Dock’ which will restart the Dock application….and that’s it! Open Launchpad and check out the smaller icons!

Wow, what a week. Over a week ago I decided to upgrade my hackintosh to Lion 10.7. I downloaded the installer, setup my USB drive and well, got frustrated. I installed Lion 10.7 and wasn’t able to get my Asus nVidia 8400GS 512MB video card back to it’s full resolution. So I decided to start from scratch..pretty much. It’s very important to have a full cloned back up of your hard drive. You can find out here on how to back up your hackintosh hard drive to a bootable disc . So my back up contained Snow Leopard 10.6.3, what meant I had to bring it up to 10.6.8 before going to Lion. Actually, you need to be at 10.6.6 to update, but the 10.6.8 Combo pack is all that’s available to update. So here’s how I did it: Updated my 10.6.3 machine using MacOSXupdCombo10.6.8.dmg DO NOT REBOOT WHEN COMPLETED Run MultiBeast (Snow Leopard Edition); selected EasyBeast and System Utilities Reboot Since I use an Asus nVidia 8400GS 512MB graphics card, I had to add my device ID ...

THE UPDATE FROM 10.6.3 TO 10.7.2 I have spent a week of intense hackintosh ‘training’. I have managed to successfully install Snow Leopard 10.6.3, update it to 10.6.8, upgrade to Lion 10.7 and finally update to Lion 10.7.2. GRA-FIXED BUT…. The re-occurring issues i had after an update is getting full 3D acceleration out of my Asus nVidia 8400GS 512MB graphics card and getting back my audio. With the latest 10.7.2 update, one of my newest issues was not being able to access the App Store. And there I was, all excited thinking I was ‘the man’ for getting my hackintosh back up to 100%. THE CAUSE The problem is caused by a tag in the NetworkInterfaces.plist. Under the tag “IOBuiltIn”, you should find “true/”, but in my case I found “false/”. And this is the reason why you can’t login to the App Store. I have read suggestions like deleting the NetworkInterface.plist or re-install your network drivers. Nothing worked. So ...

Let me explain how I got here…back to Snow Leopard 10.6.3 on my hackintosh. I made the upgrade to 10.6.8, and for me it wasn’t easy because I lost sound on my hackintosh. A few weeks later, I figured it out and was cocky enough to try and make the update to Lion 10.7. Well…from reading some of the ‘How to’ guides, it seemed easy enough….for the most part, yes, it was easy. Networking, audio, I had the graphics going but it without full acceleration (QE). So night after night after night i was searching the hackintosh forums, posting for help…nothing. One or two readers tried to help, but I could get my hackintosh to recognize my video card and give me full video acceleration! It was really bothering, I pissed off at my computer, I was pissed off at the hackintosh forums….everything I tried to do, it either just didn’t work, or got my hackintosh to fail at boot. And so today I decided to install it all over, from the beginning. Gettin...

I upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and all went well except for my audio. I lost sound on my hackintosh. I was quite pissed because being a total noob in the HACKINTOSH arena, I didn’t know where to begin my search to resolve my issue. A tip for those still on anything below 10.6.8 and thinking about upgrading, use the Mac OS X 10.6.8 Combo Pack . Don’t bother with the “Software Update” selection built into OS X. You can also reference my short guide to updating Snow Leopard 10.6.6 to 10.6.8 . I turned to Google but didn’t exactly find what I was looking for. That is until I looked at the specs of my motherboard’s audio chipset. I found out the chipset is Realtek ALC888B. So I began my search with “hackintosh Realtek ALC888B” then “hackintosh Realtek ALC888B no audio”. So I came across the following solutions: This finally got my audio back up and running…which got my audio working right away without reboot. Let’s ho...