Well I just picked up my $378 HP laptop this morning at Wal-Mart.

And... GREAT news to anyone who did the same:

The AMD Sempron 2800+ supports SSE3/NX/XD/PAE, and the ram supports PAE as well.

It also has AC97 audio.

And Realtek RTL8139/810x ethernet card (I'm not sure if this will work?)

So.. it looks like this laptop will be able to run 10.4.3 very well

Whats the video card in it? and what model is it?

Without checking the HCL, I can probably say that the sound card won't work without modification to the plist file, but I could be wrong. I'll have to check on that....

The audioAC97.kext extension from the Darwinx86 install cd/moved to my system/library/extensions folder supports it on my HP X1000 laptop! even the sound level is displayed when I use the external sound control buttons!

The Realtek Network card is also supported. Internal Wireless (based on Intel mini3b isn't but probably different on yours if you have it at that price!) but is working with PC Card based on Broadcom chipset, recognized has Airport by the OS

Now what about that video card? The model?

Hmm good to know . The built-in wireless in this laptop is "Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN", so there's a chance it'll get recognized by osx86 as well.

The laptop has an ATI Radeon X200M graphics card. I don't think it's supported with the current ati kexts but possibly in the future...

there is better X series ATI support in 10.4.3

I got this laptop myself, I thought all the stuff would work great on it, but i just get the cross out image under the apple, when i do the -v at boot it just says "still waiting for root device" over and over again, and it gets stuck at the beginning, if anybody can help me out, id be greatful

Does anybody know what chipset this laptop has, or if theres a software that will let me find out? because HP tells me that its an INTEL chipset, but this thing has an AMD so i just dont believe it.

Everest Home Edition will tell you.

I got this laptop too and I have been working this thing for a while now, I can help you out.

You can bypass the "Still waiting for root device" by removing the Cable select jumper from the hard drive (just two screws.) Then you must boot with this parameter "rd=disk0s1 -v" of course the -v is optional, but you will get to see what is happening.

The next error you will receive is:

BSD root: disk0s1, major 14, minor 1
nfs_boot: networking is not initialized
panic(cpu 0 caller 0xC02AE0F8): nfs_boot_init failed with 6

I have asked what this means and no one seems to want to help me with this. Quite a few people got this laptop and I think it would be awsome if we could get this to work.

P.S. I have installed 10.4.1 on the hard drive using a USB adapter and my desktop system, but it would not boot on the laptop. I didn't really look into it that hard, and I don't remember where it crashed. I would have tried 10.4.3 8f1099 and 8f1111 but I do not have PAE on my desktop.

P.P.S. You cannot bypass this error by disabling the network interface. You can only disable the wireless in the bios and that does not help.

So, were you ever able to boot? or did another error pop up when you fixed the HD thing?

Sorry about the late reply. No I have never been able to boot into some kind of gui. The farthest I have gotten is installing 10.4.1 on the hard drive with my desktop system with a USB adapter. I then booted off of the 10.4.3 8f1099 DVD and botted with "rd=disk0s1 -v" and I think that makes it go through another install, but from the hard drive. It eventually got to a blue screen with a movable mouse, but nothing after that. I even let it sit for an entire 24 hours.

I am writin a two page write-up on the black friday wal-mart lappy and will try to be as detailed as possible. I really want to get this up and running badly as I know this would be the cheapest mac laptop ever... and it would make me feel much better about spending $400 again

well that laptop was a pretty good deal, the onboard ethernet is realtek as well, which is good. Atleast this thing wasnt a celeron, thats all i have to say

Well I probably know half our problem....this laptop has an ATI chipset, which I heard is the least successful chipset working with Mac OS. Oh and screw OEM manufacturers (dell, hp, gateway, etc.) THEY DONT LET YOU EDIT THE BIOS IN ANY WAY!!!! except boot order Whoo Hoo! Im still happy about this laptop though, graphics card in a laptop thats under 400 dollars, I can totally live with that