I thought I would write a new post with my thoughts on the new iMac that I bought, this may help some people who are not sure if spending that much money on a computer is worth it or not. I need to add of course that I have owned the 24 inch iMac and know enough about this sort of thing already. Given the time since using Apple computer in a proper sense (I have a Hackintosh running 10.5.8), it would be nice to see what has changed, how much I had forgot and how working on such a large display would either Aid me in my work or hinder me due to the size. Let us begin then on this journey back to the mac.

The Arrival of the Hardware

The box arrived at 7:30am on a Tuesday and if you recall I ordered it on a Sunday – so that’s not bad going at all and it saved waiting in all day for this to arrive. I was expecting after watching various un-boxing video’s for the plain outer box to have another one inside but with refurbished it seems there is not inner box, no marking whatsoever with iMac on the side and so forth. I checked it over, it looked un-marked and got it set up in place. The good thing about the imac is that there is one plug with no other wires at all (apart form the network cable of course). The Mouse and keyboard is now Bluetooth, my old one was the wired version with keypad and the mouse was the one with the little ball.

Boot it for the first time

On the first Boot, the white screen seemed to stay on for ages and then finally the welcome video played, it soon picked up many updates, rebooted and found yet more updates. I have seen people complain about Windows 7 doing this but it seems Apple are the same, maybe not as many reboots of course.

Getting used to the Hardware

The keyboard is really small and most of the functions keys already do something so this never left many for stuff like spaces (which I placed on F6). Typing on the keyboard was not as good as say my Logitech keyboard and for normal day to day stuff this is fine but if I were to write a blog post or a long email I think I shall carry on using the Windows machine. The mouse as I had heard is not the best thing in the world, the shape does not lend itself to be held properly (too thin) and it does not always respond to the clicks and swipes. Quite often I had gone back two pages as I had used two fingers and it took this as a swipe. I have heard the batteries run out quickly so this I shall see. I cannot see myself buying with the Apple charger or the induction charging device from apple – I would rather just change the keyboard and mouse.

The super large display

As everybody has pointed out, the display is big and let us not forget that apple have spaces which means you can have 4 (or more) virtual screens with applications on each, this increases productivity a lot. If you find the text is a bit small to read, remember that OSX allows you to zoom in with the mouse on any part of the screen. There is the option to use the display as an input (not sure how that works) and even get devices to attach your PS3 for example. I need to say though that the screen is very bright and as it is reflective, acts almost like a mirror and can be distracting.

The Speed of the machine

To make sure I had an Core i7 in there, I did about this mac and was happy to see instead of supply 4 GIG ram (2 x 2) they had in fact gave me 2 x 4Gigs to give me a total of 8 GIG ram. I have already price the Ram and I can get a 4GIG stick for £28, for now I am happy to leave it running with 8GIG ram.

One of the things I did was try a virtual machines running Windows 7 and this is while I had all sorts of programs open and it all ran without even stressing the machine. One thing I did notice though was the noise grew a lot louder due to the Fans running on full. To compare, in the Dell Desktop (also Core i7) this is not the case as it has a full case to spread the air around while the iMac is a lot thinner of course.

The Speed of powering up the machine

I alwasy thought my Dell Windows 7 machine was slow at starting up and I do not count the time it takes to get to the desktop but rather the time it is before I can actually use the machine. I knew what was slowing my machine down though and this is the fact I have lot of backdrops on my NAS drive and the desktop switcher it working out what picture to choose next. The iMac stays at the white screen doing nothing (in my eyes) for as long as my windows machine is loading to the desktop, once I get the spinning wheel, it takes mere seconds to get to the desktop and of course is now is ready to work (unlike Windows). The iMac is faster but not by that much which surprised me, maybe if I had SSD it would boot very fast indeed.

Conclusion

Given the speed, the ease of use that comes with OSX and the fact there is no wires trailing all over the place combined with the large display makes this machine more than worth the money. I would suggest that the Core i5 and even last years models (2010 – the one I bought) are more than enough to do day to day stuff as well as play games. I will probably be replacing the mouse and keyboard at some stage but for now I shall try and get along with what was supplied.

If you recall, I bought myself the Icy Box External SATA holder and for most part I used this as a means to add extra drives as required (mostly 2.5″ models) for storing data. As this device operates with eSATA (as well as USB) – this means it can be as fast as a normal internal harddrive. I pondered on the thought of having various operating systems per drive and by selecting this on bootup – I can indeed boot into another OS without ditrubing my present system

Preparing the disk

On my internal Drive on my Dell I have Windows 7 64Bit, I did not want to upset this by adding Linux although it is not that bad an idea (same end result). The Laptop I have already has Ubuntu 10.04 64bit installed, so the task at hand was to make a exact image of this onto another 80GIG SATA 2.5″ Drive.

I used the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to boot the Laptop which gives a Windows like OS and the ability to run Norton Ghost, I had attached a 60GIG USB Drive with the idea to make a image of the Linux box. Ghost kept telling me that Linux needed to run CHKDSK, I tried this and it made no difference. In the end I got a USB Lead and plugged the Caddy into the Laptop and use a direct Image copying program to amke a 100% exact duplicate of the drive. As this was USB, this took some time.

Will it work?

After re-attaching the eSATA to my Dell machine and the 80GIG Drive which now has a copy of Ubuntu Installed – I pressed F12 (to select the Boot device). There was a large list offered and finally I worked out that the one to pick was Toshiba which had 80 in the title somewhere. Soon I was booting up Ubuntu desktop and as the Laptop also had ATI – I was good to go for Compiz. Everything worked as expected, it was fast and easy to boot into Linux when needed although if I was going to work with Linux, I would probably be happy enough with VMWARE for example as Virtually it runs very fast (due to Core i7 and 9GIG RAM).

Other possibilites

What about Hackintosh? You can install or have an attempt at least and just pick this external drive and if it does work – you just press F12 and boot into the drive, instant OSX and should you instead want to use Windows 7, then simply reboot – no dead machine. I can imagine you can do the Same with USB2 Drive but it will be a lot slower – so be warned.

Yes Hackinotsh Fans – I tried to update the Athlon in the Last Story to 10.5.7 to allows Safari V4 but after much trying and eventually failing, I managed to kill the machine enough that it needed a rebuilt, this was not big deal for me, do it all the time anyhow. Read on and find out how I managed to get the machine working with all the updates on-board…

Initial Try

I tried with iDeneb 10.5.7 and was met with the same non-booting problem (Silver apple on the screen, no spinning globe) and I went back to xXx 10.5.6 once again, updated it to 10.5.7 and the same thing happened. At this point I was sure I was indeed flogging a dead horse (sorry to all the horse lovers out there) but I am not one to give up anytime soon.

F8 Switches

I did what I never do – I pressed F8, Typed ? and read what it was telling me – what is this I see, if you type voodoo, it loads the Voodoo kernel – get out of here. I type this and there it was , a fresh new 10.5.7 desktop looking at me in the face. Basically then the problem is – it is loading the Vanilla Kernel and this is not going to work on my Athlon, Voodoo will though.

Modding the Kernel

I went in and edit the Boot.plist (/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist) and added a Line in there I thought was the part to type Voodoo for me – but all that happened was no switches / F8 and I was now stuck. I booted into Vista (and got very annoyed at how much disk thrashing occurred – what was it doing??), loaded the Demo of MacDrive to allow me to re-edit that file and reboot, press F8, type Voodoo and be back into OS X.

A Better Loader

I grabbed Chameleon 2 from the web and installed this, the good thing about this is it stops at the loading screen and allows me to type “Voodoo” which is a pain but personally all that works at the moment. I got the sound working (AC97) by using a combination of a few different AC97 files – Seems I put one on, reboot, no sound, put another, sound but later back to no sound and trying only the 2nd does not work – so this AC97 thing is a bit Hit & Miss.

Thoughts

Can anyone take any AMD Machine and make it work? Thats is impossible to say but the AMD64 3700+ supports SSE3 – a whole world apart form the AMD 2800+ which was previous generation for example. The motherboard is a typical NFORCE Model (ASUS A8NE-FM), sound been AC97, Gfx Card been Typical Nvidia, Network is Nforce – so every single one of them is supported in one way or another.

The iDened 1.5.1 (10.5.7) probably did work, had I typed Voodoo at the F8 Prompt and it had newer drivers, just meant less work for me after the install basically. This is not the final resting place for the Hackintosh for this machine, 10.5.8 is out, no doubt i shall try this and again my machine will fail to load, the fun is not trying to get a machine to be a Mac but rather the challenge of making an old AMD into a Mac – it defiantly runs a LOT faster then either Vista for example.

I recently turned my time once again to turning a normal desktop PC into a fully fledged OS X desktop, out of all the machines around me, I choose to turn a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P (AMD 3700+ 64Bit) into a working Mac Desktop.

Specifications

• ASUS A8NE-FM Motherboard
• Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2Ghz)
• 4 x 512MB DDR Ram = 2GIG
• 120 + 80Gig IDE Drive
• GeForce 7600GS (256MB Ram)
• DVD Writer x 2
• RealTek AC97 Sound (on-board)

iDeneb 1.5.1 (10.5.7)

I wanted to aim for the latest, so I grabbed iDened 1.5 and patched it up to 1.5.1 via PPF which in turn would run the latest – been 10.5.7 at this time. When I got to the Disk Utility, I had wiped and partitioned the 80Gig Drive which as it turned out was the Slave or D Drive – this also meant that Vista was still on the machine and running nicely. I ticked all boxes and went for it (silly of me) rebooted, Pressed F8 to get the boot menu up and selected Slave HD to boot from – this failed.

I went through the process for the 2nd time, I selected what I thought would work, been a NFORCE Chipset etc but I was met with a spinning icon and upon checking, it was the “waiting for root device”. I had two more goes with many different options which fitted the hardware I had and I never got to the point of a desktop, I was almost going to give up here, I had a working Vista but I had an idea.

xXx 10.5.6

Another disto I had already downloaded was one called xXx 10.5.6 Final – would this work? Would it upgrade? I Installed this ticking the known hardware I had such as NVrush for the graphics card, nForce for the network and I thought I had picked the right sound with AC97. Once finished, I rebooted and up came the starting animation. I checked what had worked and basically we had the graphics with QE etc plus the proper resolution, the network card worked but no sound.

10.5.7 

I did not want to waste time installing software and drivers only to install the update and it fail, so I had the iDeneb 10.5.7 update already downloaded, I installed it, rebooted and had the same issue as the iDeneb above – zero boot.  choose not to worry too much about this update, it was not really important enough.

Working

I re-installed the OS again, did all the updates bar the 10.5.7 one and it worked. I finally found a sound driver (just labelled AC97) which after a reboot, the sound worked. I checked and had the sound plus also the MIC input etc – brilliant. I had also grabbed the missing ALEX Voice (I used to copy this from a real Mac) and installed iLife 09. Needless to say it all works as far as I can tell – if I need to boot Vista, I just switch it on, if I need OS X, I have to remember to press F8 to select the right device.

Thoughts & Conclusion

It was shown here that even after 5 attempts of picking the right hardware on the install, the iDeneb Failed on me whilst he xXx 10.5.6 version worked first time. My Suggestion if you wanted to attempt such things is make sure you know what the hardware is, right down to the model number and have a few different distributions on hand. Not all hardware will work, the top two been Dual Core cpu seem to fail it a lot and Intel Wireless. 

I am still getting people asking me in various places and mainly in chat on the Tech Buzz about everything to do with making a Hackintosh with whatever hardware they have around with such as will there wireless work (yet do not know the make or model), sound or even how to get the files in the first place.

The first thing to mention is that your going to need to “Torrent” The files, this can take a while to find and a lot longer to download, it is after all a complete DVD we are downloading. Next your going to need a DVD Writer to write the resulting ISO file to a blank DVD, you would be amazed at how many failed to see they would need such a thing with questions such as “Can I not use a CD instead” – well doh.

I always suggest that you have a system which you can wipe as once the installer gets going, it is going to wipe that hard drive, it is easy to place a spare HD in that laptop and save having to wipe the OS on there for example. If it gets to the installer, this is a good start, if the machine is not going to work, it will not even get this far and you would have lost nothing at this stage. If it foes get to the installer screen, you have to make sure you know what hardware you have, boot into windows and make a note of soundcard, video card etc.

Lastly – my advice is just suck it and see – what is there to loose? Try it and if it fails, start again – yes it takes ages but we are after all getting OS X Machine for Free. A Point to remember is that unless Apple used the hardware in one of there machines at some point, then it won’t work as nobody actually writes any drivers as such but just modifies what is already around.

You can use two web sites to look things up yourself, after all this is what I do, I did not invent OSX86 or try it on every Laptop/Desktop – I just got it working across a very wide range of machines with a of trial and error.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

(This is the Wiki – has a lot of info)

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php

(This is the forum – ask there).