I bought this little Netbook some time back now, it was an impulse buy and the goal was to have a small netbook to take around various sites to SSH into Server and for this it worked great. It came with 512MB ram (cheapest one with a proper HD) and I have installed Ubuntu, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 through it’s life. I thought I would give it a go at OSX – why not right?

Upgrading the RAM

Now the first thing I had to do of course was upgrade that RAM and I must point out you have to rip this thing apart just to get at the RAM, that’s a pretty bad design by any stretch and the board contained 512MB soldered on, so with only one slot, you can only get up to a max of 1.5GIG – pretty Lame. Had I know this info at the time, I would have stumped the extra cache and bought the 1GIG model. Anyhow, I installed 1GIG DDR2 Ram and this bumped it up to 1.5Gigs which helped the speed a great deal.

Installing OSX

I first tried iDeneb 1.5.1 which is a 10.5.7 distro, I had a problem with the keyboard in that 7’s would repeat and this made it impossible to type in a password or anything for that matter. I moved onto a Guide posted HERE which explains how to do this via iPC 10.5.6 distro and everything went well following that UNTIL I updated via the iDeneb 10.5.7 update and this meant I had to type “cpus=1” every single time, I could have easy fixed this but the next part killed it dead – I chucked in various Kext’s and was met with a white screen and a dead system in fact – moral here is do not go wild and chuck in any old kext or you will kill the system.

iDeneb 10.5.7 (1.5.1)

I was back to this again and worked out that I had to select the PS2 fix which made no sense but it helped and now the keyboard worked as well as the trackpad. I had a working 10.5.7 system at this point minus the wireless and it is known the wireless in the Acer One not to work fully, some have had a little success but mostly it is prone to failure. I tried the various fixes as listed and at one point had the wireless showing up but not connecting and upon reboot was met with a kernel panic.

Dell Wireless Card

With the Dell Desktop, I got a Dell 1505 Wireless N Card which came fitted into a PCI holder – now I had no need for this on my desktop (I connect via gigabit wired) but it would work a treat on the netbook. I ripped it apart once again (getting good at this now) and replaced the wireless and rebooted. Low and behold not only did the wireless light come on (which is new to me) but OS X Booted up. I checked and there was wireless symbol, it showed me all the wireless and I connected. We now had a fully functional Mac NetBook – something Apple has failed to provide as of yet.

Update to 10.5.8

I simply went to software update and updated – problem was, although the machine worked, the graphics were now 800×600 and no Quartz. After searching and finding various fixes, I found the 10.5.7 one and now had 1024×600 with Quartz, there was some slight graphical glitches but mostly it worked.

Working or not?

The end result is a Netbook Powered by an Atom 1.6Ghz with 1.5 GIG ram and Wireless N Networking running OS X 10.5.8 fully updated. It seem’s quite nippy and apart from the small screen size, can do everything a normal apple laptop could. Reason mainly for OSX was speed and just to see if it can be done.  

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).