How to edit Chimera to always boot with my options...?

[xcroupier]

A Newbie here.

Well, I successfully installed SL 10.6.7 on my HP Elite Desktop. Specs are Quad 2 Core @ 2.66 GHz and 8GB RAM. Everything but my Firewire (Lucent chipset) works.
I used Chimera boot loader (from MultiBeast 3.71) and after a few successful boots, at the GUI, I tapped a key and found the myriad of boot options for Chimera. I would like to implement several on a permanent basis but don't know what to edit... and I suppose 'how' to perform the edit as well.
As far as I can tell, the boot loader is in my EFI partition (which I ca neither access nor even see). Whatever I'm to edit surely resides there.
Any help would be awesome. But please remember that I'm a Newbie and will more than likely need a step-by-step set of instructions.

Thanks in advance.

p.s. This site is fantastic!A week ago, I knew nothing about Apple Macs, and now I've installed it on my PC and have begun to experiment with its OS. Awesome.

 

[samisnake]

open finder, under 'devices' on the left itll have your osx hard drive.
in there you should find an 'extra' folder.
in there, there is a com.apple.boot.plist file.

open that. if you cant open it,open it with the text editor.
this is where the chameleon options are saved.

the layout is slightly different to how youd do it in the chameleon boot screen.
eg, say you are using the option pciroouid=1 at startup, in the boot.plist youd write that as

<string>pcirootuid</string>
<key>1</key>\

the part before the = is string, the part after = is the key.

 

[2MNY]

You can also download and install the Chameleon System Preferences preference pane (PrefPane). It offers an easy and organized graphical interface for editing the com.apple.Boot.plist file.

 

[xcroupier]

open finder, under 'devices' on the left itll have your osx hard drive.
in there you should find an 'extra' folder.
in there, there is a com.apple.boot.plist file.

open that. if you cant open it,open it with the text editor.
this is where the chameleon options are saved.

the layout is slightly different to how youd do it in the chameleon boot screen.
eg, say you are using the option pciroouid=1 at startup, in the boot.plist youd write that as

<string>pcirootuid</string>
<key>1</key>\

the part before the = is string, the part after = is the key.

Thanks. But I tried that before and my changes did not take effect. Further research seemed to indicated that the com.apple.boot.plist file which needs to be edited resides on the EFI partition which I apparently have no access to.

 

[xcroupier]

You can also download and install the Chameleon System Preferences preference pane (PrefPane). It offers an easy and organized graphical interface for editing the com.apple.Boot.plist file.

I'll give that a shot. Will this allow me to edit the com.apple.boot.plist file on my EFI partition? Or is the one in the /Extras folder all that I have to edit?

 

[samisnake]

Thanks. But I tried that before and my changes did not take effect. Further research seemed to indicated that the com.apple.boot.plist file which needs to be edited resides on the EFI partition which I apparently have no access to.

there is only one com.apple.boot.plist.

were you able to save it after making changes? (did it ask to save or close when you finished editing it, and tried to close the window?)

 

[xcroupier]

Thanks. But I tried that before and my changes did not take effect. Further research seemed to indicated that the com.apple.boot.plist file which needs to be edited resides on the EFI partition which I apparently have no access to.

there is only one com.apple.boot.plist.

were you able to save it after making changes? (did it ask to save or close when you finished editing it, and tried to close the window?)

As I recall, it was a tedious process. I believe I dragged the file to my desktop, edited it using Text Editor, and the saved it, and dragged it back to its original folder and did an overwrite. Does that sound abour right?

 

[samisnake]

yeh, something like that.
i dont drag to desktop as its not needed, but yeh its the same process.

maybe its how you edited it? dont mean that in a patronising way but that might be the reason?

what were/are you trying to change?
copy the contents of the boot.plist in here, and also write what you want to change and ill change them for you, you test it to see if it works.

2 heads are better than one and all that

 

[xcroupier]

yeh, something like that.
i dont drag to desktop as its not needed, but yeh its the same process.

maybe its how you edited it? dont mean that in a patronising way but that might be the reason?

what were/are you trying to change?
copy the contents of the boot.plist in here, and also write what you want to change and ill change them for you, you test it to see if it works.

2 heads are better than one and all that

I suppose that I could have made a typo or something. The syntax seems straight forward enough, though.
My changes 'wish list' is to hide certain partitions, rename one and see if I can change Chameleon's resolution. Ecerything is stretched until the SL desktop shows up. I'm running 1920x1080 natively.
Perhaps there are other options to play with as well.
Certainly I thank you for your input. I can't edit my .plist now as I'm within Windows doing a project for a friend. I have to finish it in a timely fashion.
I'll post my results of your suggestions along with my desired changes tomorrow evening.

Thanks again.

 

[samisnake]

to hide partitions, get the drive info from chameleon rather than diskutils, as diskutlis sometimes shows the wrong info.
iirc, you press f10 on the chameleon bootscreen, and it comes up with the info on disk/partition.
guessing you already know the next bit, but just incase, add

<string>Hide Partition</string>
<key>hd(x,y)</key>
to your boot.plist

(x being the drive, y being the partition)


to change the res of the chameleon theme, try changing it in the theme's info.plist. itll be in /extra/themes/(name of your theme) there should be 2 references to the resolution, change them to your default res.
that fixed i