280 replies to this topic

[Mathieu]

These laptops can run OS X, but they still have many issues when compared to a real Mac.

For instance, my T60p (I am not sure why the T60 made it in your list, and what are the differences with the T60p) works pretty well: see list in my sig. However, it doesn't recover from sleep (actually it doesn't sleep, it hibernates), network works but I have to plug the cable after boot, wifi doesn't work yet and my external wifi doesn't seem to handle WPA correctly (so I have to switch my configs to use WEP).

Also I tried connecting the laptop to an external projector for a presentation and that didn't work (the boot screen goes to the projector, but there is no more image when the video card driver initializes). The touchpad doesn't do two-finger scrolling (although it can with the synaptics driver but then it's so fast that it becomes unusable for anything else that two-finger scrolling).

Last, I didn't dare yet upgrading to 10.4.9 as I just managed to get the ATI FireGL 5200 to work.

Mathieu.

[Detosx]

I went for a HP DV6205us, $660 from Fry's. I got sound, ethernet and wireless working, but not the built in card reader. Sleep doesn't work. If you update to 10.4.9 via Jas' update - and I would hold off until you know roughly what you are doing - don't forget to adjust the fsb to 133 and to follow his and other's instructions carefully.

Keep in mind that with all of the above you're going to have to edit some kexts. Not great if you are an impatient newbie. When some people post on these boards they expect you to have some background knowledge in editing. To avoid repetition, look for Rammjet's and others excellent posts in the forum's Genius Bar. Frustration, determination and, quite often, joy!

I was going to get a Macbook but that screen is too small (for my needs) and the keyboard is tiring if you use it for long projects; plus with Leopard and ilife 7 due out within the next four to six months and new screen technology promising six to eight hours, the timing was all wrong. Still a very cool little laptop and Apple people are very helpful indeed.

If you do get this laptop and intend to dual boot with Vista you should upgrade the memory to at least 1gig (it has two slots; you'll need a matching pair). Why HP put Vista on this laptop is beyond me, beyond commerical considerations; 512mb is NOT enough memory for Vista (even Vista Basic), it runs like a slug that ate concrete, the problem made much worse by HP having installed all kinds of software that starts at boot up. Way to put people off Vista! The poor hard drive is being almost constanly written to as virtual memory. I found by comparrison that OS X runs on 512mb very comfortably, very fast, albeit you can expect better with 1gig. Upgrading the memory to 2gigs (I went with the Crucial brand) took me two minutes in the bathroom (any carpet-less room is okay; equally avoid static inducing clothing! Yes, I'm stating the obvious but static is a sod). Vista then sped up massively, though I rarely use it. MS deserve credit for backwards compiblity and there are things to like about it. Morally you do have to factor in the price of buying Tiger OS X (which then sits on a shelf unopened...) but it's not expensive and Apple absolutely deserve the money.

If you want an easy life, which is to say if you don't want to edit kexts, change the fsb, re-partitioning the hard drive and so on, just buy the Macbook. It comes with OS X and ilife 06 out-of-the-box! Battery life is WAY better than any Hackintosh, even if you do later buy the nine cell HP battery. On the other hand... if you are not averse to risk taking and need a laptop right now rather buying the existing MacBook or waiting on the new one...

Interesting. I went to Fry's site and find that they have upped the spec. The DV6205us now comes with 1gig as standard and they have upped the hard drive from 80gigs to 120gigs. Price $749. That's quite a jump but on the other hand, the 80gig hard drive is pushing it - the HP rescue partition takes up about 6 gigs of that, leaving only 74 to share between Vista and OS X. If you're like me you want an additional data partition.

[quasar_x]

The HP DV6205 certainly looks interesting. Only the glossy screen "BrightView" puts me off a bit (only personal taste I guess).

I am currently looking at the Acer Travelmate 2480 and 2490 series (2482/2483 and 2492/2493) which have very similar specs like your HP. They are one of the cheapest laptops that are available here in Europe and have a Celeron M 420/430 (Yonah, SSE3) with GMA950.
Most components seem to be working more from I gathered and WLAN could always be swapped anyway.

I am only still a bit unsure about the audio, since people here seem to have had mixed results. The audio chipset is a ALC883 (Intel HDA).
Apparently some got audio working properly while others only get audio on line-out/headphones, but not on the internal speakers.

Some feedback from Travelmate 2480/2490 owners on this would be great, since this generally looks like a good OSX86-laptop at a bargain price!

[skyfox]

quasar_x, on Mar 27 2007, 04:18 AM, said:

Have you already managed to resolve the audio issue? Did you already try the HDA/ALC883Audio.mpkg patches?
Most budget models of Acer (also Travelmate 2482/2483/2492/2493) seem to use the ALC883. Generally they look very interesting as a cheap Hackintosh laptop.
I am just interested to know if anyone has already managed to get the internal speakers working with the patches that have been released recently.

Regarding the paperclip method, I was under the impression that it is only required for the GMA900 and not the GMA950 - am I wrong? I would also disagree with the statement that the Radeon 9600 is the "only" properly working gfx chip. From what I read, the GMA950 is usually even less hassle to get working, sometimes not requiring *any* editing/patching.

I did use the ALC883 package you mentioned above, and chose 3 port with digital.  That got me headphones, but no speakers.  I haven't tried anything else since then, as headphones are good enough for me.

I didn't have to do anything special to get GMA950 working perfectly.  Simply chose it as an option in Jas' 10.4.8 installer.  No paperclips were harmed during installation

[quasar_x]

skyfox, on Mar 27 2007, 08:46 PM, said:

I did use the ALC883 package you mentioned above, and chose 3 port with digital.  That got me headphones, but no speakers.  I haven't tried anything else since then, as headphones are good enough for me.

I just found a tutorial of "how to get audio working" from a Travelmate 2480 owner. LINK.
Funny though that he reports to have ALC882, not ALC883 like you. Maybe Acer used different chipsets in the Travelmate series and this is the reason for the mixed success with audio? Also note that he only uses 10.4.5.

Another interesting budget-laptop for OSX86 with Celeron M and GMA950 could be the HP/Compaq NX7400. Only problem is again... audio.
From what I read, nobody has yet managed to get the AD1981HD working on the NX7400.

[skyfox]

quasar_x, on Mar 27 2007, 05:06 PM, said:

I just found a tutorial of "how to get audio working" from a Travelmate 2480 owner. LINK.
Funny though that he reports to have ALC882, not ALC883 like you. Maybe Acer used different chipsets in the Travelmate series and this is the reason for the mixed success with audio? Also note that he only uses 10.4.5.

The main problem seems to be that "Internal Speakers" appears under the Inputs list, not Outputs where it belongs.  I'll try that tutorial later, but since I have a different chip and 10.4.8, I'm not getting my hopes up.

[quasar_x]

Good luck, hope you get it working! Maybe user "docky" could help if you run in to problems. LINK
He's also using an Aspire 3680.

[ciper]

My laptop isnt fully supported without modifications BUT the Geforce Go FX 5650 works with full accelleration and no modification when I installed the JAS 10.4.8 SSE2 dvd and included the NVidia drivers. Does that count for anything?

[Reptar]

I have an Acer 3680 which I bought this past weekend.  I have almost everything working including sound from speakers.  The only thing not working for me is the Yukon Ethernet port.  Using wiFi exclusively and may get a USB to ethernet adapter if I decide I need a hard wire for speed. Anyway, use SkippyRetards ALC883 package and select 6 ports.   This gives 3 sets of speakers in sound preference panel.  Select the 1st set and you should get sound from the speakers.  Be sure to go in /Applications/Utilities/MidiSetup to set the volumes for sound I/O and defaults.  Only thing with the speakers is A) tinny sound as expected and pretty low volume even with Volume turn all the way up.  There may be a way increase the amp gain using the info plsit for AppleHDA, but i haven't played with that (yet).

BTW.  Anyone have deep sleep working with this laptop?

[jonokti]

Does the PCMCIA slot work on the Acer 3680?


thanks

[Reptar]

I don't have a pcmcia card, but it does show up when "dmesg | grep PC" from the terminal.  Others have claimed it works fine on 3680 so I assume mine will work as well.  Go here http://forum.insanel...showtopic=29583 and follow instructions

[quasar_x]

For the Acer 3680 (and other Acer models with the ALC883) it could be interesting to have a look at the specific changes they did for getting ALSA to work under Linux.
Look here
From the changelog:

hda-codec - Fix for Acer laptops with ALC883 codec

So there must be a difference in ALC883 compared to other, non-Acer laptops.

[Lejenk]

Well, mine works, few problems, only sound out, and the wifi isn't working, neither the cardreader.
The rest is working, also both cores.
It would cost about 700 euro's by now, bought it a half year ago, for 980 euro

[quasar_x]

deamobile, on Mar 28 2007, 07:24 PM, said:

Well, mine works, few problems, only sound out, and the wifi isn't working, neither the cardreader.
The rest is working, also both cores.

"Sound out" as in line-out/headphones or internal speakers?

[Lejenk]

Erhm, guess internal speakers, dunno, standard notebook speakers

[skyfox]

Reptar, on Mar 27 2007, 07:45 PM, said:

I have an Acer 3680 which I bought this past weekend.  I have almost everything working including sound from speakers.  The only thing not working for me is the Yukon Ethernet port.  Using wiFi exclusively and may get a USB to ethernet adapter if I decide I need a hard wire for speed. Anyway, use SkippyRetards ALC883 package and select 6 ports.   This gives 3 sets of speakers in sound preference panel.  Select the 1st set and you should get sound from the speakers.  Be sure to go in /Applications/Utilities/MidiSetup to set the volumes for sound I/O and defaults.  Only thing with the speakers is A) tinny sound as expected and pretty low volume even with Volume turn all the way up.  There may be a way increase the amp gain using the info plsit for AppleHDA, but i haven't played with that (yet).

When you plug in headphones, do the speakers automatically turn off?  I saw where somebody else had gotten speakers working, but still had this problem.

[Reptar]

Plugging in headphones does not disconnect speakers. You have to use sound prefernce pane to select your input and output source.  This is not a "bug" but rather how Mac's work as far as I know.

Acer is not using a standard pinout for the ALC883 that is why we have some driver issues.  But honestly I have been able to get around everything except the Marvell Yukon (which I think is tied into the ALC883 somehow) and deep sleep.  I have dual boot with XP ( Trashed the Vista Basic that came preploaded) and I sprung for an AirLink 101 USB to Ethernet adapter (12.99 +S&H at Fry's).  Will use SustainableSoftworks.com driver for Mac side.

As someone said, this laptop is tough to beat for 4 bills.  It's no MacBook in quality or design, but its half the price and great for casual or business use.  I wouldn't try to do any serious graphics work or video editing using it, but I wouldn't on a MacBook either.  Need the MacBook Pro for that.

[naplo]

I have an ADI 1986A Soundchip in my Notebook and I don't know which driver to use. Do you have an idea?

[quasar_x]

A Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 might also be a good choice. Most components are working right off from the start. Sigmatel 9200 sound seems to be working now.
Only "problem" is that you can only run on one core, but this applies to all Dells and might get resolved with future kernels.

[babs]

Dell Inspiron 9400

see sig...