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Dell Precision M6600 and MacOS Lion - driver/howto

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ju76

ju76

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Hi,

i have installed MacOS Lion with the standard Methode from insanelymac

and on the step with the DSDT Auto-Patcher 0.6, i don't have a idea to bringt the rest of the hardware back to live on MacOS X Lion.

Did anyone know, what can i do?

Hardware:

Dell Precision Workstation M6600
Core i7-2720QM
8GB Ram
Intel 510 SSD - Win7 & MacOS Lion - AHCI Mode - OK
NVidia Quadro 3000M (FullHD) - OK
Dell Wireless 5550 HSPA+ WWAN - OK
Intel 82579LM Gigabit Lan (NOK) VEN_8086&DEV_1502&SUBSYS_04A41028&REV_04
Intel 6300 AGN (NOK) VEN_8086&DEV_422B&SUBSYS_11218086&REV_35
Firewire - OK
Dell Wireless 375 - OK
Webcam - not tested yet VID_1BCF&PID_280B&REV_0
Alps Touchpad - (NOK) ACPI\DLL04A4
IDT High Definition Audio - (NOK) VEN_111D&DEV_76E7&SUBSYS_102804A4

What i have done:

i use the guide from insanelymac from first to the auto-patcher point.

at this point you need a network connection, and i can make this via my GPRS/UMTS modem. this can be enabled with this trick:

Code: 
We will be using screen in Terminal.app to connect to /dev/tty.usbmodemfd222 or /dev/tty.usbmodemfd224

screen /dev/tty.usbmodemfd222

now type:

AT [ENTER]

If you see OK as a response you are comunicating with WWAN modem now.

now activate modem radio by entering:

AT+CFUN=1

wait few moments and you can leave screen by pressing :

Ctrl + a and Ctrl + \
and answering y

then i add the line in the boot.list

Code: 
	<key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
	<string>y</string>

for get the high FullHD resolution.

so, this i the state of installation for know. if anyone knows more or have ideas to bring the hardware completly to live on MacOS X Lion, please help me.



kind regards

Alex
 
Please let us know if You handled with problem - got the same PC and problems:/
 
Ju76, about the audio, I made it work with the next kexts:

https://rapidshare.com/files/1949156568/AppleHDADisabler.kext (you must install it in Extra)

https://rapidshare.com/files/2758522252/VoodooHDA.kext (you must install it in S/L/E )
The VoodooHDA had a issue in the plist, and initially you could not turn the volume up or down. Now It works :D

https://rapidshare.com/files/1983898875/VoodooHDA.prefPane (you have to install this after you reboot)

Hope to hear from you, to see if this works also for you.
 
Hey guys,

A fellow m6600 owner here, the first thing I did with my machine was install snow leopard followed shortly by lion. It's been "running" for almost 2 months now. However one huge issue has plagued the entire time, and I was wondering if any of you had any input or different experiences.

I've gotten all of the major components of my machine to work, however I have never been able to get the expected Geekbench results to show that the hardware is being fully utilized. I score around 7,000 to 8,000 points. Which is very low for a Core i7 machine and the same as my 4 year old core 2 duo powered laptop.

Now I know that these benchmarks are not THE measure by which I should rate my machine, however, I can see the lack of performance in everyday tasks. Flash videos are just unwatchable due to extreme choppiness, many transitions inherit to OSX have bouts of noticeable lag, even scrolling in Firefox and Safari isnt nearly as smooth as in Windows. So clearly, I'm missing something.

Anybody else seeing this?
 
Aaron J said:
Hey guys,

A fellow m6600 owner here, the first thing I did with my machine was install snow leopard followed shortly by lion. It's been "running" for almost 2 months now. However one huge issue has plagued the entire time, and I was wondering if any of you had any input or different experiences.

I've gotten all of the major components of my machine to work, however I have never been able to get the expected Geekbench results to show that the hardware is being fully utilized. I score around 7,000 to 8,000 points. Which is very low for a Core i7 machine and the same as my 4 year old core 2 duo powered laptop.

Now I know that these benchmarks are not THE measure by which I should rate my machine, however, I can see the lack of performance in everyday tasks. Flash videos are just unwatchable due to extreme choppiness, many transitions inherit to OSX have bouts of noticeable lag, even scrolling in Firefox and Safari isnt nearly as smooth as in Windows. So clearly, I'm missing something.

Anybody else seeing this?
Click to expand...

Hi Aaron! I guess the main issue here is the lack of a good video controller for our board. What video card do you have? I have been able to play HD videos, but this machine is not running as smooth as my dell m1530 hackinstosh.

And proper DSDT could make a difference; MalD0n helped us on this site:
http://olarila.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=348

I have a Quadro 3000m.

You will have to register yourself to download the DSDT.

I think we can work together to make some improvements to the dsdt we have now, so that our machines can be working a lot better.

At the moment, my m6600 is pretty much, ****ed up. After installing PowerISO 4.8 on windows 7, the darn thins asked me to reboot and since then I can not do it!!

After the dell splash screen, the machine does not even gets to the bootloader.

I don't now exactly what happend; What i Do know is that I am very happy to have got the Gold, Pro Suppor and Accidents Warranty.

Let's stay in touch!

By the way, have you been able to the scrolling in the touchpad in Lion?
 
Thanks for the reply! Yes that 3-year included support is awesome. I have a Quadro 4000m in
my machine. Lion correctly detects the 2GB of ram on the card but apparently not it's capabilities.

I have not gotten any gestures to work on the touchpad. I got my kexts for that from kexts.com.

I also have the touchscreen on mine and both Snow Leopard and Lion both recognize it as a drawing board.

It's pretty sweet to be able to launch Mission Control and be able to swipe through it. Unfortunately the calibration is waaaay off making it all but useless.
 
GUYS!
I HAVE GREAT NEWS!!!!

I FOUND THE WAY RESOLVE THE VIDEO CARD ISSUES RELATED TO PERFORMANCE!!!
This should work for all the machines with a nvidia quadro card for mobile devices.

Proved with the QUADRO 3000M.
QUADRO 4000M, QUADRO 2000M and QUADRO 1000M have not been tested, but I encourage to follow the next "mini guide" to try to make it work properly.

I'll explain a little bit about what was the problem and what I did to resolve it first.

Our workstations have the possibility have installed some amazing video card.
The issue for us is that no Mac Book Pro, not even the most advanced one, have this kind of video cards.

So, I think that all of us tried to install the latest nvidia video drivers installers to no avail, having instead just a legend saying that this video solution was not for out machines, am I right?

I did managed to install them by showing the packages inside the installer and running them one by one.
But still, this did not resolve anything. (You can also use Pacifist).

I even installed the latest cuda drivers and nothing.

But then, after a problem booting normally, I had to use the iBoot DVD to be able to boot (thanks tonyMac for disc!!).

Once booting, I was bored, so I ran a flash game called "Divine Intervention" and to my surprise, it ran great! Then I ran the OpenGL Extensions Viewer and after running the test, I saw a huge improvement:
from running normally to 200 fps aprox, it was showing 2500 fps!!!! (even more in some tests!)

So, after a lot of testing, I realize that the difference, the thing was making the video card to work properly booting from the iBoot dvd was not any of the kexts included on it, it was not the bootloader.
It was the family and the product name on it's plist: Mac Pro 3,1!!!!

Considering that no Mac Book Pro has a nvidia quadro video card, it makes sense that the proper identifier for our machines is a MacPro one!!! Don't you think?

So, I modified my smbios.plist, putted back to the Extra folder, and after reboot, MAGIC FOR MY EYES!! It was working like God meant it to work!.

It not only allow the OS to fully take advantage of the video card capabilities, but it also made the machine to work properly, more stable.

Now, to let you know, I tried to use the MacPro 4,1 and MacPro 5,1 identifier, but it did not work. It has to be MacPro 3,1.

Now, here is the "mini guide" for all the people that is going to do it from scratch:

1. Download this smbios.plist:
https://rapidshare.com/files/543624142/smbios.plist

2. Put it in the Extra folder and reboot.

3. Download and install the latest cuda drivers:
http://us.download.nvidia.com/Mac/Quadro_Certified/4.0.50/cudadriver-4.0.50-macos.dmg

4. Download and install the latest nvidia video drivers:
http://us.download.nvidia.com/Mac/Quadro_Certified/256.02.25f01/Retail_256.02.25f1v1.dmg

5. Reboot and enjoy full video performance! :D


If you have any question, comments, just share them here!

Give this a try and share your results!!!

Rocko
 
gothic860 said:
So, I modified my smbios.plist,
Click to expand...

What did you modified?

I will try it with my ThinkPad W520 (2000M Quadro) later today and report ;)!
Click to expand...


In the SMBIOS, I changed the model name. You can give it a check to the file by openning it with TextEdit.

:D

Hope it works for you!
 
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