Build a Hackintosh – Progress report on OS X 10.5 live, 10.5.1 too

Just a brief update on the progress as I’ve made some changes to the original hardware in my Building my Hackintosh blog post due to some unforseen compatibility issues. The major change is to the motherboard, I got a Gigabyte GA-945GCMX-S2 and it works flawlessly. The original Asrock motherboard worked perfectly fine as well but the kernel driver that was written for it did not support line in or mic, and the sound itself was shaky.. so $50 down the shute.

Few other notes:

• Nearly all motherboards need to be flashed back. Asrock ConRoe 1333 needed a BIOS of less than 1.50 in order to support Leopard.
• The vanilla rollout (default) needs to be tweaked to work with the standard PC AMI or Phoenix BIOS, so when you create the partition make sure you use MBR instead of the other options.
• The “hack” post-install scripts are nothing more than dd and bootloader provisioning, for some reason the setup doesn’t set the partition as active or bootable.
• While getting the boot loader to work can be challenging, you can just boot into the OS by using the boot loader that spins up on the DVD. Same basic process used on Linux, BSD, etc, go to the boot loader options and let it know where to load the kernel from. If you have a single hard drive and single partition this will do it: rd=/disk0s1
• Make sure your hard drive is on the first or second SATA port, if your board has more you’ll run into issues (or at least I did)
• There is a huge scene / community around OS X, perhaps its finest quality. One forum I spent a lot of time on was http://forum.insanelymac.com
• There is also an IRC channel, though as with all IRC channels, stupidity is not welcome and they won’t hug your dumb away like most other places tend to. So if you haven’t read every topic on the problem you’re having at Insanely Mac, don’t bother. The server is at irc.osx86.hu and channel is #leopard
• I was not aware that the beast works with AMD chips; Apparently, it does, there are a few cooked DVDs that will work.
• The basic requirement is SSE 2 / SSE 3 instruction set, so technically anything from a $35 Celeron on up will work. For home browsing purposes I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond it.
• The ICH7 chipset I picked worked out of the box, sans sound. The Realtek 888 chipset on the Asrock did not have the kext to make it work, but Azelia (880) does and requies just a slight patch. Video, network, USB and other fun stuff worked out the box without tweaking of any kind.

Overall, works as advertised. I am not particularly impressed with the operating system, way too cartoonish and simplistic, yet practically useless (something so simple as expanding zip files stacks them on top of one another, doesn’t expand the window as more files are populated, makes it impossible to tell what came from which archive); for the life of me I can’t figure out why people like this garbage but hack accomplished.

P.S. I can’t say enough good stuff about Arctic Silver, I love that stuff. I used the retail kit for the processor/heatsink/fan assembly and its provided thermal compound had the unit smoking at 46 on the average in BIOS (80% load); When I moved the processor and assembly to the new motherboard Katie cleaned off the stock termal compound and I applied AS5 – haven’t gone above 26 degrees. Can’t beat that.

HTH, Vlad.