OS X Hax

The Screen Savers: Some minor clarifications

It was very cool to see the site mentioned on TSS this evening. Brett Larson did an excellent job explaining The Infamous Hack, but there are some things that should be mentioned about his presentation:

• He said you need to buy an AirPort Extreme to get the software. This was necessary prior to 10.2.4, but the Perl script won't work with the driver that comes with the AE base station (3.0.1). So don't go buy an AE base station just to get the driver.
• On the web article, they say to use su and the root password to get a root shell. With the standard installation of OS X, however, there is no root password set (instead, root is locked). sudo tcsh and specify your password to get a root shell.
• I am not sure where they shop, but you can get Linksys PCI and CardBus cards for more like $79 or so nowadays.
• Don't forget that if you want to use the hack with anything other than a Linksys WPC54G (CardBus card), you will need to change the PCI device ID at the top of the script.
• If you have a built-in (old school) AirPort card, your Network Preferences may get confused if you don't disable the old driver.
• Similarly, if you use a CardBus card, you probably will confuse the Network Preferences (or perhaps even panic the kernel) if you try and stop the card and remove it while the system is up. At the very least, pick a non-AirPort Location before trying to remove it. And if you're going to try and pull crap like that you may want to turn on the filesystem log to (perhaps) avoid data corruption.
• Once again, remember that there's no guarantees or support from anyone (especially Apple) with The Hack. They've tried once to disable the hack. No telling whether they may do so again.