Guest stulowe Posted October 7, 2008 Report Share Posted October 7, 2008 Hi all, Wanted to share my work in progress on a nice new gigabyte m912x. Brief video of it running here: http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=7ObbUsTaupA It is a convertible tablet umpc type size thingy and runs osx 10.5.5 wonderfully well. I have the touchscreen working fully right out to all corners at lovely 1280x786 resolution. Also working currently is the wifi (airport card added, though stock card might work), ethernet, sound, card reader, bluetooth, full qe/ci. Not tested the express card slot yet. I also have fitted an internal 3G mod by tearing up an old Huawei e220 and mounting it nicely next to the hard drive, above the wifi (its a perfect fit). oh... and upgraded the ram to 2GB. The system is dual booting OSX 10.5.5 and Vista Ultimate, both of which run fantastically well as a convertible tablet. Next job is installing coolbook to get the speed stepping working on the atom processor and then start using it to see how practical it is. Stu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Paul (MVP) Posted October 7, 2008 Report Share Posted October 7, 2008 Very very nice indeed... P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest S-T-E-V-E Posted October 9, 2008 Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 How much did that set you back? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest furby Posted October 9, 2008 Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 Cool. this looks fun to try. How was the setup/install process? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 9, 2008 Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 Hi, It cost $4200 hong kong dollars. Which at current rates is about 300 quid. A damn sight cheaper than my fujitsu u1010, and so so much better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 9, 2008 Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 Cool. this looks fun to try. How was the setup/install process? Am gonna be posting instructions soon. Am actually gonna do the whole thing again with some of the wind setup stuff to see if it makes it all easier. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest S-T-E-V-E Posted October 9, 2008 Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 Details on where you bought it from please ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 9, 2008 Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 Details on where you bought it from please ;) ah ok, bought from citicall. It's only the citicall and rck outlets that are selling these in hk (expansys hk is part of rck). They quote $4600 but a bit of wrangling in store gets them down to $4200 with a bundle of extras (usb hub, 2gb usb stick, card reader) I think the discount was also cos they quoted me for a m912V with vista on the phone but when I got to the store they only had one M912X left (xp home version). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xxcooldudexx Posted October 12, 2008 Report Share Posted October 12, 2008 ah ok, bought from citicall. It's only the citicall and rck outlets that are selling these in hk (expansys hk is part of rck). They quote $4600 but a bit of wrangling in store gets them down to $4200 with a bundle of extras (usb hub, 2gb usb stick, card reader) I think the discount was also cos they quoted me for a m912V with vista on the phone but when I got to the store they only had one M912X left (xp home version). :lol: I want one now! lol, nice stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest El HG Posted October 18, 2008 Report Share Posted October 18, 2008 I just got my M912M two days ago and have installed using Paul's instruction on my M912M. Everything worked great and also had touch screen working right after the install, but after a shut down and restart the next day, no more touch screen working. I also updated to 10.5.5 but didn't see Paul's instruction so now its not booting up. Will try to fix using Terminal if not I will reinstall since I just have started to setup so no files in it. I also plan to install Vista Business, since this will be my work machine which is nice to have Vista and Mac OS X in one machine. Stulowe any chance you'll be posting how you still have your touch screen working? Also my sound, Ethernet, and web camera is not working on the M912M. It must be different drivers. I'm going to order a Dell 1390 Wi-Fi card to make it work in Mac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 18, 2008 Report Share Posted October 18, 2008 Tablet Mac - Gigabyte M912 So it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted the video of my little project and I wanted to expand in more detail about how it is all done. Sadly, it’s not quite as simple as just a straight OSX installation. But, I now have it to the point where it is perfect for my needs (that may be different from the needs of others though). To summarise here is what currently is working and not working. Working: OSX runs pretty quick Full 1280x768 resolution QE/CI supported Touchscreen works perfectly with pen and finger touch Realtek audio through line out Full Amplified 3D audio through internal speakers – hardware mod 3G wireless HSDPA – hardware mod Ethernet Sleep works using either function key option or power button and comes back to life with power button Dual boot with vista ultimate Not working: Airport card – no idea why this no longer works (it was working ok ish before, but stopped working) – I’ll explain in more detail later. **working again now** Line in socket So the original video I posted was an installation using ideneb 1.3 10.5.5 This is fine but on first boot the resolution is stuck at 1024x768. I found a driver which got the resolution correct but the Ethernet didn’t work either and figured to maybe try the windosx installation dvd. However the airport was working. The windosx installation provided a much quicker feeling OS with graphics working perfectly at the correction 1280x768 resolution. Chipset features all seemed to be much better with this installation and Ethernet worked. This seemed the best installation to work with to get the rest of the features working. So I decided to stick with it. Upgrading the ram to 2GB was the next thing to do as I wanted to run vista on the system as well. Touchscreen To get any touchscreen working in osx is always difficult. Let me explain the problems I have had on other devices first. With most simple touchscreen devices osx is able to detect it as an interface device and it kinda works. This is a big problem as there is no calibration for use with the osx driver and no way to disable it without disabling any other usb input devices you might attach. This has been the case for both my fujitsu p1610 and u810 as well as HP tablets I read about. So I was extremely pleased to see that the touchscreen wasn’t working after installation. I identified it in windows as being a ‘Penmount 6000’. Next was to find a driver for it. The manufacturer only provides a windows driver so no luck there. So I went to www.touch-base.com who had provided one for my u810 (which you can’t use over the native osx driver). I found “Salt, Penmount 5100 Series (14E1/6000), usb for intel mac.”. I download the 100 tap demo and installed it. It works great and calibrates perfectly. The problem with touch-base is that they are more for business and corporate use and so charge $200 US for a full version of the driver. I emailed them and they offered me 50% discount for home use. Still a little expensive but figured it was the only option. So $100US on top of the price if you want the working touchscreen. Easy to install though and then it just works. The touchsreen on the m912 is very soft. This is excellent as it means finger touch is possible with a light tap, many umpcs have hard screens that really need you to use a pen. For use within osx the touch screen is good for most things. Closing progs is difficult due to the tiny red close button on windows (use your finger nails or the pen). Handwriting recognition and inking is terrible in osx, but apple have never needed to develop it further as its not really used for anything. If you want a pad to write notes and use ink then vista is still a far far better experience. But I don’t, I use the touschscreen for navigation in the os and apps, scrolling and web browsing, and tapping in simple text (like URLs) using the on screen keyboard. The onscreen keyboard comes already built in to leopard and tiger. It does need a little fiddling to reactivate it in ideneb but the windosx seems to work ok. To turn it on http://hackaddict.blogspot.com/2007/06/tut...ard-in-osx.html Airport The system comes with an atheros ar5007eg installed in it. I happened to have an original apple airport card lying around the place. So installed that. It worked great in windows but was not appearing in osx at all. I figured this was to do with the crappy function f2 you have to do in windows to turn it on. I found out that isolating pin 20 on the card disables this on/off switch. So it was now always on, and this worked in windows again perfectly. OSx also found it with the ideneb installation, but it wasn’t quite stable and would only work with wep networks and wouldn’t work on a non-broadcasting ssid network. After the windosx installation it no longer finds it at all. I think the problem is with the pci detection, as fiddling with the iopci kext seems to have some results. Ioreg can actually see the card fine and it’s ids as a Broadcom 4328 are correct. But no amount of kext fiddling seems to get it to work properly. If anyone has had similar experiences and success on another system let me know. **As of writing this I have just got it going again, I think I might have worked out 'how to' on this.** 3G – hardware mod I decided that I really wanted my tablet to have 3G internet. I live in hong kong and 3g signal is always good everywhere (except in my apartment :lol:). I decided to use a huawei e220 I had lying around to do this. First thing was to update it to 7.2mbps firmware. Then strip it down to just the board. Conveniently it fits perfectly in the space above the wireless card next to the harddrive. First time I soldered it to the contacts for one of the right side usb ports. I figured I could sacrifice one of them (it has 3). Once the sim was positioned well it worked first time in both windows and in osx. The e220 has it’s own internal antenna which was providing about 2 bars of signal when the case was all closed, not really enough to get good speed so I used the black wifi antenna on it. Which works good, wifi gets full strength still in windows on just one antenna and the 3g gets full 5 bars everywhere. Audio – hardware mod Now audio is a little bit of a problem with this device. It has a relatek alc269 in it. Which as owners of the eeepc 1000h will know does not work. They are making very good progress here http://ipis-osx.wikidot.com/forum/t-94017/...a-kext-progress with getting it going on applehda.kext but I am not patient enough to wait for a software solution. In another thread they have got the line out working but not the internal speakers. I figured I could use the azalia fix for line out but would need another option for the internal speakers. So bought myself a little usb HY551 audio device. It is very compact and works instantly with osx. I decided to mount it in the spare pci-mini slot space. This led me to the decision of whether I wanted to lose another usb port for this or not. I know I could have used the points from the pci slot but my soldering skills are not that good, or the camera but I use that in skype on windows. So decided to attach a hub to the port I had used for the 3g mod. Found a tiny little usb hub and removed all of its connecters. Then wired it to the usb audio device and to the 3g. I hard wired the internal speakers to the lineout on the usb audio, tucked it all away, switched on and it’s all worked great. However, the internal speakers were not that strong. So went back to the shop and picked up an HY552, which is exactly the same but with an amplifier built on board. Now it is much better and actually louder than my macbook air was. Azalia audio is working for line out. But you do have to select it in the system preferences -> sound. But actually haven’t needed to as I don’t really use line out much. General usage I have been using this computer now a week as my portable. This is instead of my macbook pro so it has a lot to live up to. For general usage it has been fantastic. The performance is good, and it will happily run word, iphoto, itunes and firefox all at the same time without significant slow down. I love having the touchscreen and do find myself trying to open apps on my macbook pro with my finger. I love it for train rides and taxis as I can navigate firefox using the grab and drag plugin and 3g internet. I tend to do this in tablet mode and use the onscreen keyboard for tapping in URLs. Bash me for saying this if you like but if you want purely a tablet pc then vista still provides a better experience as it is designed for this job. The battery life has obviously taken a small hit with having the 3g and usb audio. It used to give about 2 hours 20 mins and now gives about 2 hours. Again this is fine for my use as I am never away from the power for much more than an hour. I will buy the 6 cell battery when it is available though. If you have any further questions then please do ask. This is still a work in progress and if I can’t get the airport working then I will get a usb wifi attached internally to the hub and remove the pci airport. Overall cost for the project is as follows in HKD and USD M912x HKD $4200 USD $540 Touchscreen driver HKD $700 USD $90 USB audio – HKD $60 USD $8 USB hub HKD - $50 USD $7 Huawei e220 3G – free with contract Total HKD $5010 US $645 I will post another video and some pics of the internal mods tomorrow. Stu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest El HG Posted October 18, 2008 Report Share Posted October 18, 2008 How did you setup the dual boot? Did you use Bootcamp? I have the M912M and can't get it to dual boot between Vista & OS X. what I did was install Vista partitioned the HD to a 100GB for Vista and 50GB for OS X. I installed Vista first then formated Journal the 50GB when I loaded OS X. It booted to OS X the first couple times then I updated OS X to 10.3 using Paul's instructions and now get error and can't boot up. So my question can you post the order for installing both Vista & OS X. thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xxcooldudexx Posted October 18, 2008 Report Share Posted October 18, 2008 (edited) Thanks! I'm the guy that messaged you on youtube -cooldude2810 :lol: I didnt realise it was that complicated, and as the M912 is sooo overpriced in europe I may just get an MSI wind... Edited October 18, 2008 by xxcooldudexx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 19, 2008 Report Share Posted October 19, 2008 How did you setup the dual boot? Did you use Bootcamp? I have the M912M and can't get it to dual boot between Vista & OS X. what I did was install Vista partitioned the HD to a 100GB for Vista and 50GB for OS X. I installed Vista first then formated Journal the 50GB when I loaded OS X. It booted to OS X the first couple times then I updated OS X to 10.3 using Paul's instructions and now get error and can't boot up. So my question can you post the order for installing both Vista & OS X. thanks. Hi, nothing special for the dual boot. Just installed vista first on one partition then installed osX afterwards. In every recent install I have done it comes up with a screen saying to press any key for boot options in OSX, then choose windows. You can see this on the video. If this doesn't work then I guess doing it the other way round, osx first then vista and the chain0 method might still work. Haven't used this since days doing installs with tiger. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 19, 2008 Report Share Posted October 19, 2008 new video posted at http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=THsN1mtSRgQ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 19, 2008 Report Share Posted October 19, 2008 and here is a pic of the inside back cover showing the usb audio and 3g before all the wires were tucked away Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest El HG Posted October 19, 2008 Report Share Posted October 19, 2008 Thanks Stulowe, I did install Vista first and then Leopard but some how the boot got messed up. I was able to restore the boot again by running -s using the Leopard DVD and making the Vista active and then doing the same with OS X partition. Now I get the choose of which OS to run. I haven't updated to 10.5.5 yet, I see there is a way to do it on the Wind, but don't know if it will work on the M912. I suppose it will work since I actually used the DVD for the Wind on the M912, and some how my touch screen is working again. Just like you mentioned it needs to be calibrated. I ordered a Dell 1390 Wi-Fi card to change out so I can use the Wireless option in Vista and OS X. I actually didn't think of disabling the pin 20 on the wi-fi card that already comes with the M912 maybe it would work. Too bad the BIOS doesn't have something that can enable the Wi-Fi card no matter what at start up. Thanks for all your input. Great video. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest El HG Posted October 19, 2008 Report Share Posted October 19, 2008 Stulowe did you end up finding how to calibrate the touch screen in Leopard? I also tried to enable the Wi-Fi card that comes with the M912 by tapping PIN 20 on the card to see if Leopard would reconize the card but no luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stulowe Posted October 19, 2008 Report Share Posted October 19, 2008 (edited) Stulowe did you end up finding how to calibrate the touch screen in Leopard? I also tried to enable the Wi-Fi card that comes with the M912 by tapping PIN 20 on the card to see if Leopard would reconize the card but no luck. yes, the calibrate tool that comes with the driver from touchbase works perfectly , download the demo version (title is mentioned in the instructions) to see it work, the demo works for 100 taps each reboot. Edited October 19, 2008 by stulowe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest nscxp2005 Posted November 29, 2008 Report Share Posted November 29, 2008 stulowe, will you be making a guide on how to get OSX installed on this laptop, I am wondering if to get this or the Advent 4211. Please can you let me know., All the best NSCXP2005 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest galmpan Posted December 9, 2008 Report Share Posted December 9, 2008 I would like to add something to the above guide. The audio device works if you update to 10.5.5 and follow the guide installing the Audiee program from asus users.http://ipis-osx.wikidot.com/forum/t-101853/audieee:the-less-ugly-stop-gap( Carefull in the update you lose mouse an keyboard functionality , take a backup of ApplePS2Controller first and reinstall afterwards.You also lose video hardware acceleration easily solved with GMA950 drivers found here http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?s=&...t&p=913715). Also you do not need CoolBook for stepping.Just install superhai's kext http://forums.msiwind.net/mac/good-news-sp...-oob-t4932.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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