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macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread
- Thread starter dosdude1
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A quick report back on my unscientific experiments with clean installs on High Sierra, Mojave, Fusion drives on MBP 5,5 and MM 3,1:
- The snappiest configuration is Mojave on the APFS-formatted SSD. High Sierra is just a wee bit slower, but not bad.
- Mojave on an APFS-formatted fusion drive is rather clunky. High Sierra on an HFS-formatted Fusion Drive isn't bad, but a split drive configuration is better.
- The Photos app displays strange artifacts for me during editing in all settings. Might just have to wait until the next OS or security update and hope it goes away.
- Disabling iCloud takes a big load off the CPUs and helps my MBP run so much cooler. I plan to enable it later once I've cleaned out the Contacts and other libraries that are holding the machine up as they try to sync.
- It's impressive how well Mojave runs on these machines if you treat them right.
To fix the artifacts in Photo's you can try running an app called ResXtreme and lower it from 10 bit to 8 bit and see if the works
Thank you for the pointer - I will give that a try and report back. I've tried everything else, such as repairing the library, SMC reset, etc. and nothing seems to make a difference. I really hope this works. ?
Alas, no luck on my first try with ResXtreme, but I really appreciate the pointer. Good to learn about an additional thing to try when things don't work as expected.
Another thing you could try is hold the command -option buttons when starting the Photo's app to repair it
I have already tried that, to no effect. In fact, I created a brand new library and imported just 1 photo into it to eliminate other possibilities, but still found the photo to get scrambled during editing.
It appears to be a bug in Photos, or some other quirk of the older hardware / software / or a combination thereof. It's not related to the disks, because it happens with the Photos library on SSD, HDD, or a Fusion Drive.
I finally got brave enough to put Mojave on my iMac 9,1 (24" NVidia G120 spinner HD), which had High Sierra installed using @dosdude1 HS patch. Thank you for the fantastic patcher : )
Mainly I was tired of not seeing open safari tabs from my other devices on this mac, Apple seems to have removed support for that from HS after iOS13 launched.
Surprisingly the whole process went really smoothly. I used the latest tool (I think ver 1.3.7) to download the Mojave installer, after erasing my macHD in Extended (Journaled), I didn't want to risk anything with APFS, a clean install yielded version 10.14.6 build 18G103. All that was missing were the Safari 13.1 update and the Security Updates. Safari 13.1 updated through the Software Update in Preferences without issues.
I followed post #17977, downloading, modifying then installing the standalone SU 2020-002 update which went without a hitch - build changed to 18G4032 and it shows in installations under System Report. Thanks @alphascorp
I'm assuming, just like in High Sierra, the standalone SU 2020-002 update includes all the previous SUs. Interestingly it was only after installing this SU that iCloud Safari open tabs started to sync.
Anyhow, only 2 things didn't quite work as expected.
1. Brightness control seems broken, using the keyboard brightness keys does nothing other than maybe change brightness by a shade, definitely not going through the whole spectrum. Brightness control worked flawlessly in HS.
Is there a way to migrate part of the patcher tool for HS into Mojave to fix this?
I saw one post from last year where @dosdude1 asked people to test a small patch where he was hoping to update his patcher tool with it if it all worked, I assume that wasn't the case?
Other than installing the 3rd part brightness slider app, is there a safe way to fix this?
2. In Dark Mode, without reducing transparency, Safari tabs aren't visually differentiated between the active and other tabs, they all look flat black. Is this a known issue? Is there a simple setting (other than to reduce transparency, which does help) that fixes this?
TIA
Mainly I was tired of not seeing open safari tabs from my other devices on this mac, Apple seems to have removed support for that from HS after iOS13 launched.
Surprisingly the whole process went really smoothly. I used the latest tool (I think ver 1.3.7) to download the Mojave installer, after erasing my macHD in Extended (Journaled), I didn't want to risk anything with APFS, a clean install yielded version 10.14.6 build 18G103. All that was missing were the Safari 13.1 update and the Security Updates. Safari 13.1 updated through the Software Update in Preferences without issues.
I followed post #17977, downloading, modifying then installing the standalone SU 2020-002 update which went without a hitch - build changed to 18G4032 and it shows in installations under System Report. Thanks @alphascorp
I'm assuming, just like in High Sierra, the standalone SU 2020-002 update includes all the previous SUs. Interestingly it was only after installing this SU that iCloud Safari open tabs started to sync.
Anyhow, only 2 things didn't quite work as expected.
1. Brightness control seems broken, using the keyboard brightness keys does nothing other than maybe change brightness by a shade, definitely not going through the whole spectrum. Brightness control worked flawlessly in HS.
Is there a way to migrate part of the patcher tool for HS into Mojave to fix this?
I saw one post from last year where @dosdude1 asked people to test a small patch where he was hoping to update his patcher tool with it if it all worked, I assume that wasn't the case?
Other than installing the 3rd part brightness slider app, is there a safe way to fix this?
2. In Dark Mode, without reducing transparency, Safari tabs aren't visually differentiated between the active and other tabs, they all look flat black. Is this a known issue? Is there a simple setting (other than to reduce transparency, which does help) that fixes this?
TIA
I ran into the same issue with Safari tabs in Dark Mode. Thank you for the transparency tip, I’ll give it a whirl. I read somewhere that selecting Graphite as the accent color gives a little more contrast in Dark Mode, although that didn’t work for me. Personally I found that adjusting my laptop screen angle helped improve the contrast in tab colors. Please post if you find a better fix. Thank you!
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I took another look at the tab behavior, and noticed that while the Safari tab colors in dark mode can blend into each other in dark mode, the text color of the active tab is brighter, so that helps pick out the active tab. Also, when flipping through the tabs, the active tab doesn't get hidden unlike the inactive tabs. Perhaps that is what the designers intended.
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According to the MP 1,1-5,1 GPU Compatibility List for cMP, only the 7970 is faster than the 680. That page has a note for MacPro3,1 "cMP doesn’t support SSE4.2 which is used in AMD/ATI modern GPU drivers". I don't know if that applies to the older AMD 7XXX GPUs or only to the newer AMD GPUs (RX 480, RX 580, Vega, Radeon VII, RX 5700 XT).
Read about SSE4.2 emulator at MP 1,1-5,1 MP3,1 (& others?) SSE 4.2 emulation (to enable AMD Metal driver) .
The emulator might not be needed in Catalina 10.15.4.
The AMD GPUs might not give you a boot screen. There's a page that discusses how to fix that:
MP 1,1-5,1 [HowTo] MP 3,1 Use AMD RX 580 for Mojave/Catalina and bootscreen (without flashing)
I never noticed the text brightness difference in the tabs while in Dark mode, subtle but now that you've mentioned it I do find it a little helpful.
Thanks but I was hoping if I mapped F1 and F2 to brightness, I can keep the volume controls (F10-F12) but I don't think I can. Or is there a way to map F10-F11-F12 to volume?
macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread
Confirm Just tested this on an iMac9,1 24" 2009 iMac and it did NOT work. It goes through the process, and pressing F1/F2 does step through brightness levels but as soon as you stop pressing buttons, it reverts back to the lowest setting. Also, putting brightness all the way up instantly...
forums.macrumors.com
Try this post, it worked for me on the iMac9,1 with Mojave.
macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread
Confirm Just tested this on an iMac9,1 24" 2009 iMac and it did NOT work. It goes through the process, and pressing F1/F2 does step through brightness levels but as soon as you stop pressing buttons, it reverts back to the lowest setting. Also, putting brightness all the way up instantly...
Try this post, it worked for me on the iMac9,1 with Mojave.
I was a little hesitant to try this but I just did this morning. I following what @dosdude1 typed in his original post and ran "./install.sh" instead of "sudo ./install.sh", does that make a difference?
I got a ton of errors running it - see attached.
After a restart brightness controls seem to be working fine. I'll have to keep an eye on any system oddity. Should I be concerned about all those errors?
No, those are not errors, just informational. They are telling you the kexts that have been modified and are being allowed anyway during your kextcache rebuild. Totally normal messages. Glad to hear the backlight is now working!
I see. With a number of "failed" and a "Link Failed (error code 5)" etc... I assumed these were mostly errors.
I'm really glad brightness control is working again, this is much better than having a separate app to control it. Thanks again.
Thank you it works on my iMac 9,1 except I used kextutility to install the apple backlight.kext and applebacklightexpert.kext
A quick update on my ongoing saga with Photos and unsupported Mojave:
- I pulled the plug and decided to proceed with clean installs of Mojave on my MM 3,1, MBP 5,5, and MBA 4,2
- Just for kicks, I experimented with bypassing the Legacy Video Card patch, and it didn’t seem to affect the install. Later, I saw some artifacts in the OS, such as the a dark outline around the dock, so I repeated the clean install and applied the Legacy Video patch. However, artifacts reappeared, and I had to reinstall the Legacy Video Card patch using the Patch Updater to make them go away.
- Photos continued to cause artifacts on all three machines during editing, so I threw in the towel and decided to try syncing my library to iCloud. There was a marginal improvement with photos downloaded from my photo stream, where there was less garbling of the photos during editing. However, photos uploaded from my Mac, esp RAW images, kept throwing Photos off.
- Just for kicks, I happened to check the Photos app on my iPhone XR, and found that it has downloaded one of the RAW images from iCloud with a garbled thumbnail. I was able to open the image and edit it effortlessly on the phone in a matter of minutes!
- Not sure what to make of it, but I think it’s crazy that I can use my iPhone and the iOS Photos app to fix photo glitches created by more powerful Macs in the Mac Photos app. Crazy world ?
When I clean installed Mojave on my non-AFPS iMac 9,1 I manually download and installed Security Update 2020-002, which was easy to do. It just occurred to me that it never showed up in Software Update, only Safari 13.1 update showed up there. I'm curious, if or when a future security update becomes available, i.e. SU 2020-003, how will we be notified of its availability? I assume it still wouldn't show up in Software Update or am I mistaken?
You won't be notified at all if you aren't on APFS. Software Update will simply say no updates are available.
Were there some patch updates today? My 5.1 mini popped up with 5 or so updates to patches.
I just successfully installed Mojave from High Sierra 10.13 onto my early 2011 Macbook pro, with a journaled HDD, I had no issues, just followed dosdude1s guide.
Everything is running great so far, no issues at a.
I did manually install the Security Update for H Sierra before I did anything though.
It never showed up in my updates but it came out in March.
Everything is running great so far, no issues at a.
I did manually install the Security Update for H Sierra before I did anything though.
It never showed up in my updates but it came out in March.
I have installed Mojave using patcher on 2010 Mac mini server, 2011 Mac mini server and Early 2011 MBP.
Works on all.
Problems:
- software update often fails, even for Safari 13.1 which errors (manual pkg download from apple needed, installs fine)
- manual download of security update dmg 2020-002 also fails on install with error that's its not for the system (fixed by going directly to the SU update URL and manually downloading the smaller pkg update - that update is only about 800MB - will need to re-patch the system afterwards in order to fix a non-bootable system)
- Chrome rendering on MBP, really slow, probably related to the fact MBP has AMD discrete graphics, fixed by disabling graphics acceleration option in Chrome settings page.
Overall it runs so well on these systems it has really extended their life another year or two, better than previous macOS versions, MBP runs cool with good battery life.
I suspect in the long term this will become worse due to no Metal, and more apps going to need it.
Compiler technology has probably improved in the last 10 years too.
Works on all.
Problems:
- software update often fails, even for Safari 13.1 which errors (manual pkg download from apple needed, installs fine)
- manual download of security update dmg 2020-002 also fails on install with error that's its not for the system (fixed by going directly to the SU update URL and manually downloading the smaller pkg update - that update is only about 800MB - will need to re-patch the system afterwards in order to fix a non-bootable system)
- Chrome rendering on MBP, really slow, probably related to the fact MBP has AMD discrete graphics, fixed by disabling graphics acceleration option in Chrome settings page.
Overall it runs so well on these systems it has really extended their life another year or two, better than previous macOS versions, MBP runs cool with good battery life.
I suspect in the long term this will become worse due to no Metal, and more apps going to need it.
Compiler technology has probably improved in the last 10 years too.
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