Installing Snow Leopard on ThinkPad X61

[virtualdiver]

glad you got it...

cheers!

[vampyrex13]

It took several hours of trial and error, but I managed to get a fully working X61-7675 working with all hardware in 32-bit mode on 10.6.3 and 10.6.4, including a fully functioning fingerprint scanner and the MC5725 Verizon wireless card. Sleep also fully works and I managed to make some changes in the DSDT code to prevent the system from waking up immediately after going to sleep. Sleep when closing and wake when opening the lid work. The screen auto dims when idle and will dim when switching from AC to battery. CPU and drive temp works in iStats and native speed stepping is enabled. Bluetooth also wakes up from sleep, although it may take 30-45 seconds to become responsive. Make sure the wireless radio switch it turned on before booting, otherwise bluetooth may not be available unless you reboot. AD1984 audio is fully functional via an EFI string in the boot file.

These are all the drivers you will need to install. You will need to use the asereBLN bootloader, otherwise shutdown and reboot may not work properly. Remove any other drivers you already have, otherwise you will get a kernel panic.

http://www.mediafire.com/vampyrex13

[xinweix]

How to update 10.6.4 update? When I almost finish it while clicking the mkg installer, I got kernel panic indicates that the version doesn't match. Any idea to solve this problem? I am running vanilla 10.6.3.

[vampyrex13]

Here's an updated com.apple.Boot.plist which has all the PCI card information injected via EFI strings, so you no longer need to install the IOPCIFamily.kext. The wireless card I have setup is the Atheros 5212 802.11abg.

[mightycrown]

Originally Posted by vampyrex13 It took several hours of trial and error, but I managed to get a fully working X61-7675 working with all hardware in 32-bit mode on 10.6.3 and 10.6.4, including a fully functioning fingerprint scanner and the MC5725 Verizon wireless card. Sleep also fully works and I managed to make some changes in the DSDT code to prevent the system from waking up immediately after going to sleep. Sleep when closing and wake when opening the lid work. The screen auto dims when idle and will dim when switching from AC to battery. CPU and drive temp works in iStats and native speed stepping is enabled. Bluetooth also wakes up from sleep, although it may take 30-45 seconds to become responsive. Make sure the wireless radio switch it turned on before booting, otherwise bluetooth may not be available unless you reboot. AD1984 audio is fully functional via an EFI string in the boot file. These are all the drivers you will need to install. You will need to use the asereBLN bootloader, otherwise shutdown and reboot may not work properly. Remove any other drivers you already have, otherwise you will get a kernel panic. http://www.mediafire.com/vampyrex13

Hi. I am running SL on this machine as well, got most of the things working. Can you please explain how you achieved native speedstep and all the temp reading? BTW which way did you enable your graphic card, by bootloader? or DSDT injection or patched kext?
Appriciated

[vampyrex13]

Originally Posted by mightycrown Hi. I am running SL on this machine as well, got most of the things working. Can you please explain how you achieved native speedstep and all the temp reading? BTW which way did you enable your graphic card, by bootloader? or DSDT injection or patched kext? Appriciated

I used a combination of DSDT and injected info into the IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext. I think what I have currently on MediaFire might be the wrong revision of my kext file. I'll attach my corrected files to this post and will redo my zip files on MediaFire sometime tomorrow. As for the graphics, I'm using GrandFlash's X3100 kext with an EFI string. I'll also attach my EFI strings in xml format. I've also included IOSDHCIBlockDevice.kext to replace VoodooSDHC.kext.

[sammys]

Hi all,

I've managed to install SnowOSX distribution on my X61 (7676-3PM). The machine is stock with an Atheros AR5BXB72 bought from eBay and using AHCI for SATA. The wifi card doesn't work without a quick additional step. See the bottom of this post for that.

The only thing that's not working at the moment is the LCD brightness. Will update this post once I'm done.

I used most of the instructions from the first post in this thread. Only issues I hit were the bootloader wouldn't work. Here are my amendments to the instructions above:

Before installation:

• Copy the X61 pack to a USB stick. I've used TransMac trial version to format the USB stick in HFS+ and then dragged the files over from a folder on Windows. Delete the DSDT folder.
• Download the ZIP attachment below and extract it to a Windows folder then copy the content over to the USB stick using TransMac.
• Download Chameleon bootloader RC4 and extract it to a Windows folder then copy over to the USB stick using TransMac. Make sure you copy the snow leopard version over to a new folder on the USB stick.
• Optionally download the 64-bit kexts I've listed below as they are what I've used. I've installed those AFTER I updated to 10.6.2 so I'm not sure they'll work in SnowOSX 10.6.0.

After installation and before the first restart:

• Insert your USB stick and do all the kext deletes/replacements etc in the first post. Delete dsmos.kext and AppleHDA.kext from /System/Library/Extensions and install to the same place fakesmc 2.5 from the USB stick. No need to delete AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement and AppleIntelCPUPowerManagementClient kexts because SnowOSX has NullCPUPowerManagement, which disables those modules. Copy the DSDT.aml file from the USB stick to your filesystem root (/Volumes/<volume name>). Use the kexts in my zip instead of the ones in the X61 pack as my zip has newer versions. If they don't work in 10.6.0 use the ones in the X61 pack instead.
• Follow instructions on How to install Chameleon manually to replace the broken bootloader with the new one.
• Run the following command in Terminal:
  diskutil repairPermissions /Volumes/<volume name>/System/Library/Extensions
  Where <volume name> is the name of the volume you installed Snow Leopard to. Make sure you use double quotes around it if i you have a space in the volume name. Use ls -d /Volumes to see what the available volumes are.
• Restart

When you see the first boot screen from Chameleon press any key then type:

-f arch=i386

This flushes the kernel extension caches in OS X. After booting you can add the kernel flag arch=i386 to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist so you don't have to type it anymore.

It is possible to update your system to 10.6.2, 10.6.3 or 10.6.4. 10.6.2 introduced 64-bit drivers for the X3100 display adapter but sleep is currently broken in 64-bit mode (Haven't tested it since 10.6.2). It works in 32-bit mode.

There are 64-bit drivers available for all the hardware on the X61. All of them are working except for the X3100 FB driver. I've installed 64bit drivers for the following:

• Intel 82566MM (from this page and it's included in the kext bundle in my later post)
• VoodooPS2Controller from VoodooLabs
• VoodooHDA (AppleClip updated by AnV using original VoodooLabs sources with the latest fantastic enhancements by Slice and AutumnRain

If anyone figures out the sleep issue on 64-bit kernel please post about it.

NOTE: I may have accidentally skipped some stuff above. E.g you may have a problem booting either 32-bit or 64-bit because of kexts like IOPCIFamily or IOATAFamily. I've replaced both of those on my X61 as I was getting kernel panics or bluetooth wasn't working. I didn't try 32-bit mode until after I had replaced them so I'm mentioning them in case the problems exist in 32-bit mode. (UPDATE) Since 10.6.3 (could be earlier) I now have vanilla IOPCIFamily, IOATAFamily and IO80211Family kexts working though the latter (IO80211) might still not work in 64-bit mode though it's compiled for it.

Here are the links to the versions I was using:

• IOPCIFamily (Fixes kernel panic in AppleHPET when booting 64-bit kernel). The vanilla version works fine in 10.6.3 and later (32-bit).
• IOATAFamily. The vanilla version works fine in 10.6.3 and later (32-bit).

Atheros AR5BXB72 (AR5418): Install the AtherosFix kext and it'll work in 32-bit mode. Install a 64-bit IO80211Family kext and it'll work in 64-bit mode as well. NOTE: If you don't have the same adapter as I do you'll need to add your adapter's PCI ID to the AtherosFix.kext/Contents/Info.plist file before it'll work. The AtherosFix kext makes your card look like a AR5416 card (Airport Extreme).

That about does it... Would love to hear if anyone manages to get their X61 working.

Don't download the kext bundle in this post. I've been updating it in later posts and you'll find the latest one at:
Latest sammys 10.6.2 kext bundle for X61
Latest sammys 10.6.3 kext bundle for X61
Latest sammys 10.6.4 kext bundle for X61

[junying]

Hi Sammys,

Thank you for your helpful post. Also you NIXin.

Have you noticed that your bluetooth was working after the initial install, but stops after the 10.6.2 upgrade? Seem to have happened to me.

[sammys]

Yeah I have the same problem. I'm also getting app crashes for firefox and thunderbird plus USB holds up the shutdown for a few seconds.

[sammys]

I've managed to get bluetooth running again! I stumbled on this post by laqk explaining that HPETs should have all interrupts they use assigned in the DSDT. So I added an extra (unassigned) interrupt to the DSDT and away we went.

I used the following command to figure out what interrupts were taken:

ioreg -w 0 -k IOInterruptSpecifiers | grep IOInterruptSpecifiers | tr ',' "\n" | sed 's/^.*<//; s/>.*$//; s/^\([0-9a-f]\{8\}\)\([0-9a-f]\{8\}\)/\1 \2/' | tr ' ' '\n' | sort

You might need macports installed for some of these commands

I've attached an updated zip file containing my DSDT.aml, DSDT decompiled and all non-apple kexts I'm using. I've also replaced the previous IOSDHCI kext with a 32-bit only version of VoodooSDHC. Haven't found the 64-bit version yet.