It took me a day to get all of my stuff together and pull this update off. I use my HackBook Pro in a production environment, which means I cannot be too far away from my Time Machine drive. As the excitement mounted, viewers of this blog had already dove into it — head first, and pulled it off with mixed results (Read the comments below for more information). A lot of what you did getting to 10.5.4 will save you some time because from what I’ve gathered by updating from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5, it’s mainly just copying over a few key kexts that get replaced with the update, repairing permissions, etc. etc.

Let’s begin!

1) First, download the update directly from Apple’s website. I’m not sure if it matters where you get it but this is how I did it. I’m sure Software Update is safe but don’t take my word for it. You can grab 10.5.5 at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/macosx1055update.html

2) Before you run the downloaded file, open up Terminal and type “sudo su -” without the quotes. Enter your user password and then type ‚ “while sleep 1 ; do rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext ; done” without the quotes. Keep this window open while you run the downloaded update and install it. It should complete in a few minutes and ask you to reboot. Before you reboot, exit the Terminal script by holding down Ctrl and pressing X (Ctrl + X). Close Terminal and hit the button on the Update to reboot your computer.

3) Once you reboot your screen may go blank or your system might auto reboot. Don’t panic yet. Reboot the system again, this time booting with “-v -f -x” and let it do it’s thing. Your screen will probably still be blank. Let it run until there’s no more CPU or HDD activity. Reboot again with normal flags (-v -f) and let it go to sleep. Wake it up and you should be seeing the login window. If you auto login you can swipe your mouse over your hot corner (You kept that hot corner, right?) and you should see your desktop although it may appear unstable. Log out and back in. Boom!

4) Your wireless is dead, your battery doesn’t display and your sound isn’t as groovy as it used to be. Time to step back in time. Dig through your Extensions.bkup on your desktop and locate a few key kexts. Grab the latest version of Kext Helper b7 and prepare to do battle with permissions. Rather than re-patching, re-applying, etc. the steps we did in 10.5.4, we’re just going to copy over the good stuff we know worked before.

5) Fire up Kext Helper b7 and start dragging kexts into the window. Enter your password and click Advanced. You’ll want to make sure the following are displaying in Kext Helper b7: AppleHDA.kext, AppleACPIPlatform.kext, AppleAHCIPort.kext. Hit the install button and then hit Kext Permissions and Tag Cache Rebuild. Hell, hit them a couple times! Now close out of Kext Helper b7 and do the Disk Utility dance by repairing disk permissions a couple times. I ran it 3 times just to make sure. Your milage may vary.

6) Reboot. You should have everything but the battery meter. Download PowerManagement.bundle again and do your thing. Make sure you completely remove the old one (“rm -fr PowerManagement.bundle” in Terminal). Repair and reboot again. Alternatively you can back up your original PowerManagement.bundle from /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/PowerManagement.bundle.

This should work for everyone who is running 10.5.4 and possibly those running earlier versions of Kalyway’s DVD. These are as clear of instructions I can give and I must admit, they’re a little less user friendly than my original tutorial. Hopefully you’ve been following me on this blog and know a few things by now. Be sure to run Time Machine, Super Duper or Carbon Copy before you dive into this if you care about your files. After you upgrade to 10.5.5, there are some minor software updates awaiting you. Nothing major, all risk- and error-free.

While your milage may vary, the chances of you “hosing” your system is very slim. Even with a kernel panic, blank screen or spinning beach ball, not all is lost. Remember, this isn’t Windows Vista. You aren’t required to re-install for every little hiccup. Play with it, have fun, and post your success/failures here with screenshots.

NOTE: 10.5.5 doesn’t wake from sleep for some reason. Even after trying the usual methods. We may have to wait for a kernel patch or additional kext to restore it. I’ll start looking into the issue this weekend if nobody posts something here first.

A little history: I started on the infamous “deadmoo” VMWare image of 10.4.1. This was probably one of the first quality releases showing a functional Mac OS X on Intel hardware. Yes, this was before the days of the Intel Core Solo Mini or any Intel-based Mac you could get your hands on. After buying a ton of upgrades to make VMWare Workstation (Windows XP SP2) manageable to run the first glimpse of OS X, I copied it over to a live partition and started the grueling process of booting natively.

I succeeded after many late nights and ran Mac OS X 10.4.1 until the ‘JaS’ release of Mac OS X 10.4.8. This was probably one of the better Mac OS X Tiger releases and people are still running it today. I quickly tried forcing all the upgrades I could on 10.4.8 until it finally broke. After surfing around the usual forums and torrent sites, I ran across a personl calling himself “mac.nub” and he had just released a very sought after 10.4.10 with all the toys.I had a lot of trouble with Mac OS X 10.4.10 (mac.nub). After fighting with kernel panics and graphics issues, I went back to 10.4.8 (JaS) until the release of Mac OS X 10.4.11 (XxX) which I’m still running today with all the updates, including iTunes 7.5, Safari 3, etc.

People started playing around with beta copies of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.0) and reported mixed success. Even on some “real Macs” users were complaining about Leopard freezing, crashing, and being incompatible with popular software and hardware configurations upon its release Oct. ’07. Leopard also left a lot of older Mac users in the dust due to its higher requirements.

My Hackintosh was running quite poorly (Yes, I know 512MB of RAM is part of the problem) after using it for a while. With a ton of applications running, and trying to squeeze Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3 on there was a challenge. After running XBench and a couple other tools, I realized my disk read/write speeds were horrible. Also, my 20X DVD Writer was stuck burning at 5X to 8X which made things worse.

I decided to leap on to Mac OS X Leopard.

I rounded up another hard drive, a 120GB Western Digital I pulled out of my Wife’s Compaq SFF (Thanks, hun.) and downloaded a copy of Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Kalyway) which included ToH Kernel, Vanilla Kernel, and Vanilla ACPI Fix. After burning the small, hacked up image to a DVD-R I was ready to roll. I made sure the hard drive was Primary Master, did a quick check of my BIOS settings and rebooted to a long wait for the installation GUI to appear.

After partitioning the whole drive to HFS+ I selected it for installation, made sure it ran the disk check to double-check everything even though the checksums for both the archived Leopard and the ISO file were correct, and waited approx. 45 minutes for it to finish. It displayed incorrect “time remaining” but I had a similar issue with OS X Tiger. No big deal. It automatically rebooted itself after the installation was completed and I received a “b0 error.” I completely forgot to click ‘Customize’ just before the installation and select some drivers and options. I decided it was best to start over. I re-formatted the drive, selected Vanilla + Vanilla ACPI, Nvidia drivers (Natit) for QE/CI support, and EFI MBR since I formatted the whole drive.

After another 45 minutes or so, I saw the boot loader. Woohoo! After running with boot option “-v” so I could see what’s going on, it ran the normal kexts and such until about 35 seconds later when it automatically rebooted without warning. The messages flash on the screen so fast that I couldn’t read the last few lines before it decided it was time commit suicide. I video-taped the screen with my smartphone and went back in slow motion and realized it was an ACPI error. I tried forcing the location with “rd=disk0s1″ to no avail. It now acted normally but when it said “Starting Darwin/X86″ it’d reboot again. This was on the mach_kernel. So I tried vanilla, and no luck there either.I ended up sticking with tohkernel (ToH), which is what my 10.4.11 Tiger runs. It’s included on Kalyway’s DVD if you boot with “tohkernel -f -v” it cranked up to a welcome screen showing the Leopard logo. I quickly realized that for me, you can have either all-PS2 or all-USB. This means if you try to run a USB Mouse and PS2 Keyboard, it will for some reason stop all your PS2.

I ended up with a working mouse and no keyboard. I grabbed my half-broken G4 Graphite Keyboard (USB) and paired it with my el cheapo Walmart USB mouse (ProMicro) and off I went. After getting very frustrated with my broken keyboard’s spacebar, I decided to play around with some options until I realized that if I plug in a PS2 keyboard -AND- a PS2 mouse, it all works!

Here are some screenshots for you to drool over. You can find all the files and tools you need on your favorite torrent sites. Be sure to scope out the OSx86 Wiki‘s HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) for supported hardware before you toast your eMachines. I highly recommend InsanelyMac.com’s forums for any issues you might be having during or after the setup of your very own Hackintosh.