Mac OS X 10.4 with garage sale parts

[Jerico Tolentino]

Hi everyone,

 

This is my first post here and I'm not very good at teaching others how to install on non-Mac hardware, so just post your suggestions, questions, corrections or opinions for things I may not be doing right. I'll try to answer what I can and learn from you.

 

But before I go on, I do not give any guarantee that this will work for you. It may or may not work. Perform the following at your own risk.

 

My objectives in trying this out:

1. Test if it would work with minimal hacking

2. Be able to browse the web (Firefox, Safari works too)

3. Use my IM client (Yahoo messenger)

4. Use my VNC client to connect to another Mac (Chicken of the VNC)

5. Use an NeoOffice

6. Use Lightroom 2.0

7. QE/CI should work out of the box

 

Parts I picked up at a garage sale:

ASUS P4V8X-MX Socket 478 Motherboard (flashed it with version 1009.008, don't know if it helped or not though) - $10

Samsung 40GB Parallel ATA Hard Drive - $5

 

My old stuff:

Intel Pentium 4 2.40A GHz (Prescott)

2 x Generic 256MB DDR 400 RAM

HIS Radeon 9600XT 128MB

Asus 16x DVD-ROM/CD-RW Drive

DLink LAN card (sorry, I couldn't figure out what model -- onboard LAN doesn't work so I used this instead)

Generic ATX case

Antec 400W Power Supply Unit

Generic PS/2 Keyboard

Generic PS/2 Mouse

LG 17" CRT Monitor

 

Other configurations:

1. Hard drive is set to master, DVD drive is set to slave

2. Machine boots from DVD drive first, then hard drive

 

Procedure:

Note: This is for educational purposes only. If you want to install Mac OS X, buy a Mac or at least buy a copy of Mac OS X. I have a Macbook running Leopard and I'm happy to pay Apple.

 

1. Grab a copy of JaS 10.4.8-AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3

2. Burn the contents (not the ISO) to a DVD

3. Restart your computer and boot from the DVD

4. If necessary, edit your partitions using Disk Utility (on the DVD) and erase everything on the hard disk. Create just one partition and format it as Mac OS Journaled. I named mine Macintosh HD.

5. Pick the stuff you want to install from the DVD. I deselected some things however like Additional Languages and Printer Drivers (I didn't need to print on this machine). Other things I selected were the Intel extensions. For AMD users, I'm not sure if the installation will work like mine. I don't have an AMD system I can play with right now.

6. Wait for the installation to finish, remove the DVD and reboot.

7. If you're lucky, you'll be asked to set up your Mac. Otherwise, boot with a -v argument and check what's wrong. The forums might have an answer for you though. Do your research.

8. After filling up the information, just sign in with your username and password.

9. That's all. Really.

 

Conclusion:

So objective #1 is done (no further hacking required) and objectives #2 to #6 were just a matter of downloading the apps and checking if they work. So far, the features I need are working without problems. For objective #7, I checked System Profiler and to my delight, QE and CI was supported.

 

Things that I find strange:

1. When I click on About This Mac, the computer closes all apps, logs me off and prompts me to log in again

2. There's a small mouse artifact (slightly annoying) near the cursor at times

3. The flurry screensaver freezes after about 5 minutes. When I move the mouse or keyboard however, the system is still fine.

 

Other stuff I want to try:

1. I'd like to see if I can upgrade to 10.4.11 so I can check out if iWorks 08 and iLife 08 work with my set up.

2. I want to get the onboard sound and network to run so I can test iTunes and not need the additional network card.

3. Test if this works with SATA drives

4. Test the DVD writer if it can write to a CD/DVD

5. Test other Adobe apps - Photoshop, Dreamweaver