What identifies my system as a Laptop to Snow Leopard
I was attempting to solve a power/ battery Icon related issue with a a rather well known contributor on another site. He was getting rather frustrated and his final message to me was, "Ensure that your system is identified as a laptop."…
- Primary Author
- @DutchNeb58 Published 2010-03-01
- Collection
- Snow Leopard 10.6
- Archival Footprint
- 4,720 historical reads · 2 curated field notes (from 5 dispatches) · 2010-03-01 – 2010-03-12
- Credited Voices (3)
- @DutchNeb58 (2)@mecanoiz (2)@uman
I was attempting to solve a power/ battery Icon related issue with a a rather well known contributor on another site. He was getting rather frustrated and his final message to me was, "Ensure that your system is identified as a laptop."
Which led me to wonder about some of the other little quirks about my system...the lack of trackpad preference pane, no power/battery icon, screen not waking after sleep, even when the system does ...
When Snow Leopard is loading, or has finished, how does it identify that my system is a laptop model, as opposed to a desktop, and that a few extra tools need to be loaded as a result? Once installation is complete, is there a way to identify my laptop, so it coughs up those extras?
Any ideas or explanations?
Author Updates & Technical Revisions
Follow-up dispatches by @DutchNeb58
Okay, But what happens before the SMBios gets populated...
Okay, But what happens before the SMBios gets populated for the first time...
I've already edited the SMBios.plist information to identify my machine as a Macbook Pro. Doing that should allowed switching the SMBios data to allow such things as Battery and Touchpad to appear?
If they don't, then what? I've tried editing it to different models to see what the net effect is, but it appears nothing really changes to allow to become active. So what trigger inside the set-up, determines the flavor of the system? How do I recreate that?
Synthesized Community Field Notes
2 technical responses curated from 5 original dispatches
I'm not sure it's the only thing you should do to get those specific system preferences items.
Is your system profiler picking up the changes you made on the smbios file ?
Well, if you're using a Chameleon RC3? (but definitely RC4) derived bootloader, you can do:
<key>system-type</key>
<string>2</string>in your com.apple.Boot.plist.
Which led me to wonder about some of the other little quirks about my system...the lack of trackpad preference pane
That's dependent on the kind of trackpad you have. Most don't work out of the box with OSX. It also matters a lot of the trackpad is PS2-based. If it matters that much to you, ry VoodooPS2.
no power/battery icon
In Leo, I had it working with a hacked version of AppleACPI something or other. As I'm trying to be native, retail in SL, I'm using VoodooBattery. superhai released a 64-bit version on his website. As long as your battery is identified as PNP0C0A, then Voodoo should find it.
screen not waking after sleep
should be a trivial fix in your DSDT-- check the DSDT sub-forum, i think this fix was posted-- you're basically just notifying the display to wake up...
Sources & Contributor Provenance (3 credited usernames · Thread #5656)
| Username | Dossier Contribution | Dispatches | Active Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| @DutchNeb58 | Primary Author | 2 | 2010-03-01 |
| @mecanoiz | Contributor | 2 | 2010-03-01 |
| @uman | Contributor | 1 | 2010-03-12 |