The previous Story showed me grabbing a kalyway 10.5.1 Image, installing it without many hitches onto a Dell GX620 and i thought to myself – lets move to a better system now, namely a Core 2 Duo Laptop. Before we explain how that all went, I would like to focus on the Dell GX620 machine and how it all worked out in regards OS X running on there.
The Initial Install left me with the basics of OS X 10.5.1, Update manager popped up and I was not stupid enough to just install any old thing. I grabbed a patched 10.5.2 updated and a few other patched files and slowly put one update on at a time that was left (such as Safari, Quicktime etc). Remember at this point that i had the graphics working at 1280×1024 (with some graphical tearing), sound and networking. I installed the graphics update and my graphics were set to max 1024×768. This meant a rebuild and the next time around a few other updates, each one breaking my OS in a reboot cycle. The moral of the story here is that you have to be careful then what you install via Updates and it’s not as easy to know what works even after much searching on the net, in comparison a real mac you just updates and it works.
I then started to look around the files installed and noticed already that there was Applications missing – as I had a real Mac i thought I could share a directory and move the files across but the networking part would not allow this with permission denied. I turned instead to a 60 GIG USB Drive to move the files around and even then it was a problem. I noticed that some applications just refused to run – crashing when started. The most I can say this can be used for would be to install Soundflower (for Audio Mixing), Camtwist, Colloquy and use it as a Streaming machine – as a fully fledged work machine for OS X – this is not an option.
Now we move onto trying to Install it on a range of Hardware:
Toshiba Satellite Pro A120, features Core 2 Duo 1.66Ghz, SATA Drives etc and this crashed at loading the DVD, the same happened when trying on my desktop machine along with 3 AMD Machines (not that I expected it to work with AMD). I searched the forums and all I found was people with the Sat pro had the same problems and searching for my Motherboard (ASUS P5N-E SLi) and also trouble getting to the install screen.
Now it is possible if you personally went out and bought the known good hardware that you can make it work 100% of the time – if you try the same thing, you might be lucky and it works or it just falls over at the start screen. Personally I would rather have XP/Vista or Linux that fully works 100% of the time then have a flaky OS that the programs you put on *might* work. If you really want a mac – I suggest buy the real thing – its a lot less of a headache but of course more expensive.
