Unibody MacBook and Leopard image = no sound

[FongMan]

Hi All,

At my school a student brought a new unibody MacBook, and we have an image that all the computers use loaded with specific settings, books, documents, etc. But our image is a Leopard image. We tried the image on the new MacBook that comes with Snow Leopard pre-installed, and it went smoothly, everything seems to be working perfectly fine except: No audio devices found and also I can't adjust the brightness of the screen.

Really an truly the student doesn't care about the brightness, we're all more concerned about the no audio. We ran all software updates to make sure there weren't any EFI updates and there weren't any but we went ahead and updated everything else. Same thing. I know the sound works cause I booted to an external with Snow Leopard and there's sound. So is there any way of getting those audio drivers from Snow Leopard into Leopard?

 

[robbieduncan]

Potentially copying the kext file for the sound system from one to the other might work. When you are booted into SL run kextstat from the terminal to see which ones are loaded...

 

[FongMan]

Thank you for your lightning fast response 🙂. How does kextstat work? Never heard of it before.

 

[robbieduncan]

You open the Terminal and type kextstat. It tells you which kext file are loaded. From this you should be able to work out which kext is supplying the audio drivers.

You can see an example of the output here. It might not be easy to work out which kext you need. It's also possible that SL kexts won't work on Leopard...

 

[FongMan]

Oh wow. Kool, so in the case of audio i guess I'll be focusing on:
com.apple.driver.xxxxx
and
com.apple.iokit.xxxxx

Right?

 

[robbieduncan]

Oh wow. Kool, so in the case of audio i guess I'll be focusing on:
com.apple.driver.xxxxx
and
com.apple.iokit.xxxxx

Right?

Probably. Depends on how the audio is implemented in the MacBook. Does it have a separate chip for audio or is it handled by the NVidia chipset? If it's the latter you might need some of the com.apple.nvidia and com.apple.GeForce stuff too...

 

[FongMan]

According to System Profiler > Audio (built-in) it's Intel High Def. Audio. I just tried the ones that i found to be audio related and it didn't work, so I don't think this is going to be very successful.

Thank you very much for your responses and time 😱

 

[robbieduncan]

Ah, Ok it's Intel chipset instead of NVidia: my mistake. You may need to copy the Intel platform drivers.

Of interest what vintage Leopard is the image? If it's older than the Unibody Macbook (not that particular one you have, rather the introduction of that model) then simply recreating the image with a later version of Leopard might work, but it sounds like you've already tried that via system update...

 

[FongMan]

The image is 10.5.6. After we image the computer with it we run software update to bring it up to 10.5.8. That is a very good idea though, re-creating the image from a more up-to-date computer non-SL computer. I'll give it a shot, Thanks!