Rebel EFI from Psystar - Page 3

Kabyl · #21 10-25-2009, 06:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mindlessmissy

So long as apple can release an update to render every 3rd party hack useless, why should anyone complain ... ? ( or can they !?! )
...

I can give them many ways to do that and without really any much efforts.

Why they didn't do it... well, that's open for many to speculate about it

thorazine74 · #22 10-25-2009, 12:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TechSgtChen

Read the comments in the second article electro cites above. It's all about the amount of time and frustration you're willing to put into installing OSX86. If I asked a friend who knew a lot about building a Hackintosh to build me one, I'd be willing to fairly compensate him for his time. I have a mostly working system right now. I'm not going to waste days or weeks experimenting and God only knows how many restarts to try to get the final bugs out. If a company can do that for me, I'll pay them, although obviously not the full Apple premium.

I think you are missing the point, from what I can see (without buying it) they are selling a modified boot loader plus an lspci tool that connects to an online database that downloads kexts for the matched hardware, but of course only if its supported on a closed list of components, the ones they are selling with their machines. But the marketing call is "Install OS X on any Computer". That sounds like snake oil to me, its obviously not true, if you have a motherboard with a sis chipset or a sony laptop with an incompatible display controller, how is RebelEFI going to help you?
On the other hand it sounds like a big change of strategy I suppose because of the legal troubles: now instead of selling x86 computers with OS X preinstalled, they could just sell the "proven-to-work" hardware with no OS and just let the user install a bought (or downladed, who cares) copy of OS X, that way the user is the one breaking the EULA, not Psystar.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dies

Not really...

It looks like a "larger work" to me, it looks like they not only consolidated a few things, *maybe* made them easier to use, prettier to look at, etc. added some custom applications. Whatever BS they did, I'm pretty sure it's larger than what they started with.

From:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html

Code:

The FSF now considers the APSL to be a free software license with two major practical problems, reminiscent of the NPL:

    * It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary.
    * It is incompatible with the GPL.

See section 2 of the NPL for the reference above

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/netscape-npl.html

In any case, there is really no sense in us arguing about it. We're not lawyers ( well, at least I'm not ) and this isn't a court. I also don't enjoy pissing off people who contribute to the community.

The only point I was trying to make is that it cracks me up when people release their code to the public under a pretty liberal license then get pissy when someone does something they don't like with it.

Seems very childish to me. Either don't release the code at all, release it under a restrictive license or deal with it.

In the end it doesn't really matter because if someone really wants to steal your code they will. Not much can be done about it in some cases, even if you have a legal department at your disposal.

In my opinion you can split RebelEFI in 2 parts:
- The DUBL bootloader (OSXLINUZ & INITRD)
- The RebelEFI app (REBELEFI.PKG)
Even if you consider the whole package a "larger work" (even though its arguable that it is, it could be seen as just a bundle of 2 different pieces of code) based on Boot132, dfe, chameleon, pcefi or whatever, they would still have to release the code for DUBL.

Quote:

Originally Posted by genex

agree initrd is not a regular id some can confirm if it is a encrypted or what ?

I think its encrypted somehow, or compressed with some unknown tool, neither gzip nor cpio could unpack it. If you open it in a hex editor you would see no clear text at all so I think its probably encrypted
If its encrypted they key has to be in the OSXLINUX file somewhere I think. There is dsa_pub.key inside rebelefi.pkg but I dont think it got anything to do with the initrd.
I dont know why they would encrypt it though, there are supposed to be only kexts inside the initrd right?
I guess that really shows their true intentions, I hope someone cracks it open very soon...

TechSgtChen · #23 10-25-2009, 05:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thorazine74

I think you are missing the point, from what I can see (without buying it) they are selling a modified boot loader plus an lspci tool that connects to an online database that downloads kexts for the matched hardware, but of course only if its supported on a closed list of components, the ones they are selling with their machines. But the marketing call is "Install OS X on any Computer". That sounds like snake oil to me, its obviously not true, if you have a motherboard with a sis chipset or a sony laptop with an incompatible display controller, how is RebelEFI going to help you?

I haven't seen anything that says it only works for systems that match their specs. I'm sure there are some systems that won't work, but without actually testing Rebel EFI, I can't say how comprehensive their database is. When all is said and done, an awful lot of people are like Kabyl and me. What we like about OS X is that "it just works." We don't want to spend uncounted hours scouring forums hoping to solve minor and major problems, downloading various kernal extensions and patches hoping that one will do the job without conflicting with something else. We don't want to ask and be admonished that we should use the search function. We don't want to "learn" about our systems and how to use Terminal commands. If we wanted to do CLI work, we'd get Linux. We just want to use our Hackintoshes. Building a non-Apple Mac is still more of a black art than it is a science, although it's come a long way in the past few years. Even if you have a system configuration absolutely identical to one that works, there's still no guarantee that yours will work the same way.

Quote:

On the other hand it sounds like a big change of strategy I suppose because of the legal troubles: now instead of selling x86 computers with OS X preinstalled, they could just sell the "proven-to-work" hardware with no OS and just let the user install a bought (or downladed, who cares) copy of OS X, that way the user is the one breaking the EULA, not Psystar.

I've been saying all along in Mac forums that this is what they should have been doing instead of trying to fight Apple in court.

Dies · #24 10-25-2009, 08:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kabyl

It's probably just a waste of time that we're posting in this thread... but maybe not, in which case I hope few people benefit from this kind of discussions (I prefer to call it like that, instead of calling it arguing).

I agree, discussion is much nicer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kabyl

But I keep my right to be upset and my right to express it too, if people don't like to hear that, they can ignore me, and sorry for flooding their screens

.

O.K. fine, I guess you get to express yourself too.

Truth is, I was just playing devil's advocate and fully expected people to get sensitive / defensive or to take things seriously / personally, as a lot of people online seem to do these days.

I'm just happy to see that it's not the case in this community.

milanca · #25 10-26-2009, 03:42 AM

Quote:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Imkantus
Somebody made it to mount the initrd?

I would be interested in it's content. But I failed on trying to access it, maybe the fs is something else the cramfs...

Would be great if someone could help me.
Im interested in this too, i didn't have any success yet too...

Do you guys remember their previous OpenRestore CD? It had, i think i have it somewhere, typical linux initrd, gz/cpio compressed. I was also curious so i extracted it (nothing special in there, most of all i wanted to see the way they handle Audio).

This one isn't gz/cpio compressed, neither it is cramfs, ramfs, reiserfs, ext2, ext3 .. I am becoming more curious, what do these guys want to hide or protect.

Ianxxx · #26 10-26-2009, 11:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by milanca

Do you guys remember their previous OpenRestore CD? It had, i think i have it somewhere, typical linux initrd, gz/cpio compressed. I was also curious so i extracted it (nothing special in there, most of all i wanted to see the way they handle Audio).

This one isn't gz/cpio compressed, neither it is cramfs, ramfs, reiserfs, ext2, ext3 .. I am becoming more curious, what do these guys want to hide or protect.

The Truth lol

pαuℓzurrr. · #27 10-26-2009, 11:05 AM

Found this on a other forum, all readable text in the osxlinux file...

http://pastie.org/669790

Not really useful, but figured it could be handy for some

thorazine74 · #28 10-26-2009, 12:09 PM

Quote:

AES-ECB-%3d (%s): failed
passed
AES-CBC-%3d (%s): AES-CFB128-%3d (%s):

That sounds like variants of AES so I guess they encrypted something, maybe that weird initrd that nothing I kow can open. It makes no sense, assuming there is only kexts inside the initrd right, and some of them are just open source like RealtekR1000 and OpenHaltRestart?
Anyone tried replacing the initrd with a standard initrd.img?
Also it seems they are using pxelinux instead of isolinux for the loader if I'm not wrong.

pαuℓzurrr. · #29 10-26-2009, 12:41 PM

If it's AES encrypted then we'll probably never be able to open it right?

Edit: Could they be using dm-crypt?
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/DM-Crypt

CelciusCool · #30 10-26-2009, 05:31 PM

Quote:

what do these guys want to hide or protect.

some change to boot 132 code and loading method i think.

On the same media(Sony CD R-W 10x) chameleon 2 fails with EBIOS error even in legacy mode. But rebel EFI loads without any of them but can't load properly cause of GFX issue(screen stay black with "no entry" on display) on a GTX285

Like i've been read as it's based on boot 132, Apple can take advantage of this situation and i hope they will