This “trick” is now outdated and has been replaced by the much more reliable DSDT.aml file which automatically wakes the screen for you 100% of the time. The guide for it can be found here.
A lot of us on laptops using Intel’s onboard GMAX3100 are having to do something called the “sleep trick” to get our screens to display Mac OS X after you boot or reboot. The most common way to perform this trick is to set a hot corner (Expose) to “Sleep Display” and blindly move your mouse over to the spot, hoping it wakes the screen up and displays your new Mac. For most of us, this trick works well. For the power user (or those without Sleep), we’re constantly booting up and shutting down to save battery life.
The biggest issue is since Expose uses your user settings, you have to leave Automatic Login on for your user account to get access to that hot spot. This leaves our Hackbooks at risk for theives to just boot right up, and if they figure out how the fuck to turn on the screen, they’ve got access to all your data. Not anymore! By following my instructions below, you can have a more natural experience by forcing the display to sleep automatically during boot, BEFORE you reach the Login screen!
Download the SleepDisplay Hack
Drag SleepDisplay.app to your home directory. In Finder, this is the “place” that is shown with your username.
Open Terminal and type sudo su - then open /etc/rc.common with your favorite text editor (as root), and at the top, add the following:
# Sleep display on boot
/Users/richard/SleepDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/sleepdisplay
Replace “richard” with your username, or the full path to the location of SleepDisplay.app plus the trailing path you see above. Save the file and type head -n 5 /etc/rc.common to make sure it’s in there. Good? OK. Now go to System Preferences, Accounts, Login Options and disable automatic login. Keep Expose set to the hot corner as a fail over in case an update wipes your rc.common changes. Now reboot. Need I say more? If you’re ever stuck with a blank screen, just touch your mouse and boom — it’s up. No hot corner bullshit. If for any reason this doesn’t work, the hot corner is still there so just pretend you’re looking at the Login screen, type your password and hit Enter, then move your mouse to the Expose corner.
Easy, huh?
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April 17th, 2010 at 3:28 am
Thomas – I found out what the error was. There were 2 x 200 MB partitions that were left over from Windows 7. I reformatted the drive using GParted, and it all works well now. Thanks for your help anyway.
April 18th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Awesome! Glad you got the problem resolved. Let me know if you have any more issues/questions.
April 16th, 2010 at 2:08 am
Thomas – after trying again and failing (this is my 3rd install today), I must note that it worked fine until the hard drive went belly up and I got a new (250GB) one. Now it simply won’t work. I was on 10.5.2, and the dsdt.aml worked fine. Is there any way to use the dsdt.aml WITHOUT updating to chameleon 2.0?
April 16th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
There unfortunately is no way to use the dsdt.aml without Chameleon 2. When following this guide for installing Chameleon, make sure you follow all steps exactly, and that you include an “r” in front of your disk identifier in the second line of code ins sep 5
April 15th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
Thomas – I am not going to risk a good install to find out what the code is, but I do remember 4 lines of numbers.
April 15th, 2010 at 4:06 am
If you guys don’t care about auto login, just add the app to your auto login items from the downloads folder!
When I try to do the dsdt.aml, and i install chameleon, the system won’t boot. Why?
April 15th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Do you get some sort of error message when you boot, or some other message that may help diagnose the issue?
August 26th, 2009 at 4:14 am
This work great for my… all was very easy… thanks again.-
August 26th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Glad we could help! You may also want to check out the newer way here which makes this process a whole lot easier and effective.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Shelby- This is quite an old hack and a newer one can be found at http://www.dailyblogged.com/883/adding-a-dsdtaml-to-older-installs/. In the meantime, you can try placing a Dsdt.aml in the root of your OS X partition and see if it boots fine (this is if you have the newest version of Chameleon).
June 30th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I did this but at the same time I also installed 10.5.7 and now i cant get the screen on. i have tried to blindly log on and use the hot corner but it seems to be gone. I don’t know what to do.
April 20th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
FRauANtje- Virtually any computer can be “hackintoshed.” The only problem is if there will be support for this hardware (which there most likely already is). So short answer, yes.
April 20th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Though Dell discontinued the Inspiron 1525 there are some new 1525s available with an “nVidia GeForce GB 8600M GT” instead of GMA X3100.
Any ideas, if those Dells can be “hackintoshed”?
Thank you,
Frank
April 17th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Haha yes this would be a bad time to do so. Download iPC 10.5.6 Universal PPF5 and then use the previously posted options and this will then give you a dsdt.aml
April 17th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
well, i did that, but i couldn’t find any optional bootloaders section. would this be a bad time to say i’m using the ideneb 1.3 dvd?
when i selected my partition, it had an options button below, but was not selectable.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
steve0suprem0- To install a dsdt.aml boot from the OS X Install DVD. Then select your current OS X partition and uncheck everything but “DSDT Patcher” which can be found under the “Optional Bootloaders” section. Restart your computer again and upon booting into OS X your screen should display the login window and you will no longer need the sleep trick. Let me know how this works for you.