Mac OS X v10.6.2 Update has wreaked, if not full-blown havoc, a ripple whose effect is considerably big enough to warrant worrying among OSx86 fans, me included. In the course of the week, since the update was officially released for public consumption by Apple and before that, during the update’s beta seeding among Apple developers, lots of workarounds have been circulated and posted here and there in the web.

 As a hackintosh owner myself, I’m drawn into this mild frenzy in pursuit of bleeding-edge nirvana; being always up to date. And so without further drama, I give you a recounting of how I updated my MacBook Mini (an HP Mini 1000 with 2 gb ram) from 10.6.1 to 10.6.2.

10.6.2 IntelCoreSolo Update to 10.6.2 Snow Leopard

Downloads: Mac OS X v10.6.2 Update (delta; since I’m already on 10.6.1); Tea’s mach_kernel (patched to work with Atom CPU’s); new 10.6.2 SleepEnabler.kext from netkas.

If you’ve installed Snow Leopard via NetbookBootMaker, then this is what you need to do:


1) Put the “mach_kernel_tea”  in your “/”.
2) Go to /Extra/ and edit your com.apple.Boot.plist as in step # 2.
3) Put the new 10.6.2 SleepEnabler.kext inside your /Extra/GeneralExtensions/ folder to replace the older one.
4) Update your Extensions.mkext by running the ExtraUpdater.app – that rubber shoe icon in your /Extra folder. The key is to wait until the button is no longer recessed before restarting and losing your patience.

People at the MyHPMini.com forums have been reporting that applying NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 RC4 on their system solved the “No WiFi after 10.6.2 update” issue. It may be the easier method of the two and perhaps you’re asking why I keep on sticking with EFI, and consequently all that mucking around Terminal stuff which is a bit more confounding than a simple sets of clicks with a GUI app.

Well, I could have just ran NetbookInstaller on top of my EFI config like a few people have done and have reported it works anyway. However that combination setup would be like a spaghetti mess (I have an /Extra/Extensions folder in my hidden EFI partition, and then there comes the addition of another /Extra/GeneralExtensions/ folder in my Macintosh HD “/”) and I like being neat and clean about my hackintosh; if it’s EFI boot, then it’s EFI. If it’s Netbook BootMaker/Installer then it’s that method all throughout.

Also, based on my observation from this hackintosh stuff, kexts stored in the EFI hidden partition and those on the main hard drive root folder (“Extra” folder on “/”) seem to be loaded differently by Chameleon. I could never get the older IO80211Family.kext loaded from EFI in 10.6.2 – it loaded perfectly fine in 10.6.1 from EFI. Also from /Extra/GeneralExtensions/ via NetbookInstaller way, that kext loads fine.

The “new” IO80211Family.kext is actually derived from the updated kext installed by 10.6.2; I copied that kext from /System/Library/Extensions and edited the Info.plist for the AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext plugin to include my HP Mini’s Broadcom 4315 WiFi module in the array list to get it recognized.

This “new” IO80211Family.kext (which proves to be a newer version indeed; it’s now a CFBundle version 310.6 instead of the “older” IO80211Family.kext’s 300.20) and it loads without issues from the hidden EFI partition in 10.6.2 using tea’s modded kernel. It could be just a minor case of probe scores – kexts follow a specified loading priority depending on the probe score assigned to them – and I could’ve dived headlong into the forums once again for that but I just want what works for my setup.

And so this is, once and for all, how I updated to 10.6.2.

PS. I don’t mind getting an “Intel Core Solo” for a procie :D