Tip #00001: Working Out EqMac2 On MacOS Catalina 10.15.2

Honestly, eqMac2 had been a pain in the butt for me these days, especially regarding its ‘incompatibility’ and unresolved driver issue, given a newer macOS like Catalina.

I had loved it when I was on macOS Sierra or so. But in newer versions, newer problems arose and I eventually surrendered. Now it worked.

There had been some proposed solutions that worked for the guy who wrote them, but some people failed trying them out and eventually gave up. However, today I found a solution that worked.

I might be one of the proposers above, but I feel the deed to share it here. It’s been a long-standing GitHub issue here. I tried @indrawp’s solution there as well and it worked. Check that issue for his solution.

In short, after eqMac2 is installed, you will have the .kext file (kernel extension) within the eqMac2 application folder.

You will need to copy it into the system library extensions folder, but SIP must be temporarily disabled at that point. You’ll see why the non-SIP alternatives won’t work below.

Important notes about the solution

Disabling SIP was key to installing the driver.

Some of you may not agree with disabling SIP. Me too, I was somewhat stubborn about keeping SIP. However, disabling it was the only thing I could do to install eqMac2’s driver successfully in the system.

I tried the non-SIP-disabling alternatives others proposed, and none of them worked. If you try other’s solution and did not disable SIP (as in everybody else’s solutions), the extension files that you copy-pasted were heavily protected by system and have extended attributes I couldn’t crack, even by superuser access with chown or chmod (check by ls -l@ in the extension directory or one directory up).

And though, we can re-enable SIP after all’s done. Of course, make sure you check the status before and after installing the driver (check steps above).

Directory & driver specifics

It’s important that you copy the .kext files into ​/System/Library/Extensions directory. NOT the /Library/Extensions directory. (Notice the plural s, Indra missed that.)

Installing the driver is two steps:

1. ​​​​​​sudo cp -r /Appl​ications/eqMac2.app/Contents/Resources/eqMac2Driver.kext /System/Library/Extensions/ (again: don’t forget /System/)
2. sudo kextload /Library/Extensions/eqMac2Driver.kext (important that you load the driver extension before use!)

Then go back to Recovery Mode and re-enable SIP as per above solution. Again: it’s not mine, but I thought I’d share it out since it’s a nagging problem for long.

P.S. Moral of the story: Don’t skim issue threads carelessly. Who knows around the middle of it you’ll get a good solution and pieces of information you can use to solve it (i.e. Catalina’s system files’ nature).

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