10.4.5 Up and running after a long journey

[AREA_51]

Finaly got 10.4.5 up and running on this machine. But its been a long journey. I will start at the beginning.

 

Originaly I sucessfully installed 10.4.3 on my Opteron 170 Dual Core Machine about a month ago.

But I suffered from the dreaded stuttering problem.

So I never got a chance to play around with it.

 

Anyway I vowed at the time when I got the chance I would build a cheap craptel machine just so I can play around with OSX.

 

Anyway on Saturday the time arrived. I bought myself the stuff and put together the following machine.

 

An Axper XP-P5CM-GL motherboard based on the Intel 915GL Chipset. It is auctaly just a rebadged Gigabyte GA-8I915ME-GL

A celery D 336 2.8Gighz CPU

1Gig of Corsair Value Select RAM I had lying around.

The cheapest Micro ATX Case I could buy.

A 20Gig hard drive I had in a draw here.

And a DVD Rom I had here as well.

PS2 Keyboard

PS2 Mouse

 

I will note here right now (So dont forget as it is an important part for this story) that I checked the Axper site for the latest BIOS, the version on the site was F1 released October 05 which is what this board was already running.

 

Anyway at that stage I only had the 10.4.3 DVD patched with the JAS patch.

I installed it, install went ok. But when it came to starting up and finalising the install, the machine was extramily sluggish. And unstable.

 

So went the start of my adventure. I then spent the next 2 days nearly constantly trying different patches, different hardware configurations, different blank DVD's. Everything.

Different patch versions, different ways of installing the patches. Different startup options.

I gotta say I am glad I know my way around enough Linux commands to experement with some of the stuff I did.

 

Anyway I even started downloading the 10.4.5 install DVD last night hoping that would fix it.

 

 

Anyway I finaly got sick of it this morning and thought stuff it I will just use it as another Windows XP machine.

 

Problem is when I got Windows on the machine, it was not stable either.

I had found my problem.

I tried different things then to get windows stable.

I changed hardware again, hard drives, all sorts of things.

 

Finaly I tried the desperate. At that stage, while I had worked out the motherboard was a rebadged board I did not know what exactly.

So I then browsed different board manufacturers sites, searching for boards using the 915GL chipset to find the board this was rebadged from.

Luckily there was not too many so I found it quick enough.

 

Now remember how on the Axper site the latest BIOS was F1 released October 05?

Well on the Gigabyte site the latest was F5 released January this year.

 

So I downloaded the Gigabyte BIOS and the Gigabyte @BIOS Flash utility and cross flashed this board with it.

 

It worked. The machine stabalised. Windows ran 100% and passed the Prime95 stability test now.

 

By that time the 10.4.5 Install DVD had downloaded so I decided to install that instead.

 

Install went flawlessly. And for the first time MacOSX started up flawlessly, responsive, and stable.

 

I am assuming now that 10.4.3 would work fine too as the problems were most likely caused by the stability problems. And the fact that aside from the stuttering issue it worked fine on my Opteron machine.

 

I immedietly downloaded Firefox as safari very quickly made my want to vomit. Firefox still makes me queasy but it is better. Pity Internet Explorer is not available for mac anymore as it is the best. :-(

 

Anyway got PPC Mac Firefox up and running. Intel Mac Firefox is still too unstable from testing at this point though. Crashed a lot for me.

Tracked down a copy of Intel Mac DivX And I was off and running.

 

Started browsing my network and it immedietly found all my Windows Machines and could access them easily.

 

Still got a few issues though. Had to work out how to stop the hard drive stopping and starting every few minutes when the machine is at idle. I quickly found it in the power settings though.

But that is the biggest issue I have discovered so far, aside from lack of software support.

 

I am still experementing but my impressions so far as this.

 

I still think Windows XP is generations out in front in usability, compatability, looks, and application support.

Mac OSX is anti intuitive and hard to use in comparason. Looks ugly, and software is hard to come by for a lot of things.

Though I can see some things that do work nicely. (How programs work out of packages is a nice feature I can see)

 

But overall Mac OSX is not much more than an expensive novolty, and Windows XP is far better if you want to do real work.

 

But that is just my opinion anyway. Those who like it over Windows. Well I just say to each his own.

 

Anyway I am back to experementing a bit more.

[Swad]

Thanks for the write up!

[Dynamite]

Same, thanks! You guys make this place a huge knowledge base about OSX86, by narrating your experiences!