Author Topic: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0 RC  (Read 86054 times)

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Distemperus

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Documentation for Chameleon 2.0 RC
« on: September 16, 2009, 12:12:58 AM »
I've bundled/researched/compiled & otherwise read source to come up with comprehensive documentation.

edit: minor update to EFI instructions & clarify ReleaseCandidate status

For all newcomers:
If you are not a registered user then you will not be able to see the attached document here.
Please register to gain access to all attached files.
« Last Edit: June 21, 2010, 06:41:08 PM by Blackosx »

rocksteady

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2009, 01:21:39 AM »
Woohoo, a guy that likes to document....

a) Where have you been for so long?

b) best 1st post I've ever seen

Stop bitching, start coding or documenting or both..

P5Q-EM : Q6600 : 8GB RAM : 8800GT : SATA Drives

Gringo Vermelho

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2009, 08:03:17 AM »
Wow, that is beautiful, good job. Welcome to the forum.
10.9.5 - ASUS P8Z77-V Pro - i5 3570K - GTX 660 - Chameleon 2.3 svn-r2xxx
How to...
Install Chameleon: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,649
Make your own Chameleon boot CD: http://forum.voodooprojects.org/index.php/topic,484.msg2131.html#msg2131

rocksteady

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #3 on: September 16, 2009, 01:07:22 PM »
Thanks for your efforts Distemperus, a warm welcome here again

Going briefly through your doc, everything seems OK.

A first thought though:

Please rename your file to Using Chameleon 2RC, this is precisely the reason we didn't include all details in our official FAQ. Every subsequent RC release introduces new options, but till we get out of beta we cannot be sure which ones will stay and which ones will be dropped/changed.

More feedback when I go through your doc again.

Stop bitching, start coding or documenting or both..

P5Q-EM : Q6600 : 8GB RAM : 8800GT : SATA Drives

FlangeMonkey

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #4 on: September 16, 2009, 06:13:43 PM »
Nice one,

I'm new to Chameleon and its answered a lot of questions for me.

Thanks for the hard work.  It needs a Sticky!



Distemperus

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #5 on: September 17, 2009, 12:55:37 PM »
Please rename your file to Using Chameleon 2RC.

More feedback when I go through your doc again.

Done. I'll also cover some areas of concern myself:

• I thought that something about sourcecode was important and should be right at the top, but striking the right -> tone <- was difficult.

• The particulars of how Chameleon works & the boot* files may be wildly off

• I wanted to list where the Extra folder could go, but it looks like I may have confused the issue even more. I wanted "/Extra" to denote the root and "Extra" to just be any path, but I think for a new user, this could confuse the issue. The listing of the Extra/Extensions folder makes it look like a mess, but I wanted to cover all the bases (new & veteran users). Maybe a picture...

• somewhere it says to use the included fdisk. I don't think I used that fdisk for 10.6. This doc uses the stock OS fdisk in $PATH.

• for RAID, OrigDoc edit the /Library/Preferences/SysConfig/com.apple.Boot.plist, but this doc does it differently. My thinking was that since there will have to be an Extra folder somewhere, it should be in that Extra folder. Unfortunately, I put it onto the hidden partition which makes it more cumbersome. I think the RAID instructions should change to a root-based /Extra folder & skip the the multiple Extra folders on the hidden partition. This preserves a fresh com.apple.Boot.plist (admittedly a simple file, but when you wreck it & don't know, that doesn't help) with a single Extra folder.
-----------
changed:
• In the EFI partition formatting, I changed the unmount to sudo unmount. You need admin privs to do that which the "exit" releases earlier in the process. I didn't want users making folders & copying .kexts that they couldn't get at in the Finder or easily edit a .plist in TextEdit.

SunLizard

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #6 on: September 18, 2009, 09:52:47 PM »
Very nice.  Maybe we should label this, the Missing Manual...

Might have reduced a lot of my headaches and saved me about 57 reboots had this been available a week ago. HA!  but what fun would that have been....

Good job.

S_L
Stable Rig:
mobo: Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (ALC889a Audio)
SATA: (2) 750 Gig Baracuda
         (1) NECC 12x Litescribe DVD-DL Burner
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SunLizard

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #7 on: September 19, 2009, 06:30:22 PM »
Distemperus,

I've spent some time with your guide now (well a few hours at least.) its a very nice piece of work. If I could be so bold as to offer some suggestions...

1) RTF is nice as its universally readable by everyone, including those guys in '-s'. but you may want to shift it to PDF just so it locks things in place.  It might make it look more readable. 

2) I think the layout is very usable, recommend adding a Table of Contents just so you can see what is where in the document.

3) I think you *should* include source code analysis (perhaps create an advanced section to talk about it.)

4) Recommend adding a version/changelog discussion at some point.

5) I love the string examples.  I love code examples and find them very useful.  If you went PDF, you could add screenshots, the other think I think adds a lot to understanding.

6) For the n00bs (self included) recommend including a discussion of what files get hidden from finder and how to re-enable visibility.

Feel free to take any/some/all/none of these suggestions.  They're just my opinion and we all know about opinions...

pax
S_L
Stable Rig:
mobo: Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R (ALC889a Audio)
SATA: (2) 750 Gig Baracuda
         (1) NECC 12x Litescribe DVD-DL Burner
         (1) Lite-On 4x BD Burner          video:  Sapphire ATI 2600XT (512) PCI-E OS: 10.5.8 (Vanilla Kernel) bootloader: Cham v1.0.12  Beta: 10.6.0 (sep HDD)

diabolist

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #8 on: October 30, 2009, 01:23:31 AM »
Thankyou for this excellent piece of documentation, helped me no end!

One small point, in the section "Installing Chameleon into a hidden EFI partition on a hard drive (non-RAID):" you omit to put a step in to put 'boot' into the root folder of the EFI partition. This caught me, and took quite a long time for me to work out what I'd done wrong.

All best

Andrew

Lord Anubis

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0
« Reply #9 on: October 31, 2009, 01:10:56 PM »
you omit to put a step in to put 'boot' into the root folder of the EFI partition.


there should be no OS on the EFI partition, therefor 'boot' should be not on the EFI partition. 'boot' should be in the root folder of the partition where your OS lives. That/your step is not right and shouldn't be done.

Check your setup carefully for errors.

HTH

LA
Quicksilver 2002 Case - GB EP45-DS3P - 8Gb Kingston mem. - Q6600 - Asus 7300GT Silent 512Mb - 6 SATA drives - 1 IDE drives ( using F12/Chameleon for booting, not visible in OSX ) - 1 external Sata Samsung DVD - OSX 10.6.8 server retail - Chameleon 2.0RC1 + Cartri Bios

yeshijian

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0 RC
« Reply #10 on: February 25, 2010, 03:59:14 PM »
 ;DExcellect. this doc lets me understand Chameleon more. Thanks!

jxphajzw

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0 RC
« Reply #11 on: June 15, 2010, 04:38:37 PM »
Thank you !give me  :)

jbreher

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0 RC
« Reply #12 on: June 21, 2010, 08:46:00 AM »
As a new member of this forum, I'd like to point out something that confused me mightily.

Until one registers on the forum, one cannot even see that there is a linked file in the first post of this thread.

I would suggest that some way ought to be found to lead people who have not yet registered on the forum to this essential resource.
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P / Intel Celeron Dual Core E1400 2.0 GHz / 800 MHz FSB / ASUS EN8400GS Silent/HTP/512M PCIe x16
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EFI (empty) / iPC 10.5.6 / Win 7 pro x64
... oh yeah, and an i7 17" MBP

Blackosx

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0 RC
« Reply #13 on: June 21, 2010, 06:42:11 PM »
Thanks for the note jbreher. I have added a note to the first post to hopefully help new users.
10.10.5 / 10.11 GM1 | Asus Maximum IV Gene-Z | i7-2600 3.40GHz | 4GB | Radeon 5770 1GB

terramir

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Re: Documentation for Chameleon 2.0 RC
« Reply #14 on: March 06, 2011, 11:09:49 PM »
there is a note missing on the FAQ for those among us that use soft-raid, but also have other partitions of macosx.
Like for example mainsnow ( a striped soft raid volume) and snowemergency a single partition after the raid set on one of the HD's here's the problem since chameleon boots and finds the plist's inside the boot OSX partitions it loads it even if you select snow emergency the boot flag with the partition uuid is loaded and you end-up on the mainsnow OS anyway and if there in different states of upgrades or are trying out kext's they can conflict with each other and not let you boot the snowemergency one at all. Been having problems with this actually but I figured it out, what you need to do is add the uuid of the snowemergency partition inside the boot.apple.plist inside the extra folder on the snowemergency volume to override the previous command that is loaded by the apple plist inside the Boot OSX folder.
Now that I figured this out all I need to do is figure out how to hibernate a os that resides on a soft-raid volume, because I can hibernate on snowemergency, however I cannot hibernate MainSnow (which is striped over three HD's :) Over 300mb/s with large files :) )
terramir