Unstable 10.5.2 Kalyway - why?

[(=Nemesis=)]

Hello. First, allow me to introduce myself. I am an English student, studying interactive media (3D modelling, websites, Flash, you get the idea) and since I'd resolved not to hand over a single penny to Microsoft at any time in my life, I'd decided to go with MacOS X. So after a few months of research, I decided that getting an iMac would cost far too much, and opted for setting up a Hackintosh.

 

I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.5GHz, an nVidia GeForce 8800GT with 512MB VRAM, 2GB of 800MHz RAM, and SATA drives, which the motherboard interfaces with using AHCI.

 

I've managed to install Kalyway 10.5.2, I'm pretty sure I'm using the vanilla kernel, and I got sound working (the cost being, I think, being unable to shutdown without actually pushing the button) and all 512MB of VRAM recognised, etc. In other words, you could say that I have a system that just works.

 

But fewer than 24 hours after confirming that everything runs smoothly (I tested out most of the applications, did a little customisation with CandyBar, played a Doctor Who DVD and listened to the Beatles, that sort of thing), things started to fall apart.

 

First, iCal stopped working. It suddenly decided that (some time after it had been tested) my architecture was not supported, and that iCal therefore couldn't run. I've since discovered that this sometimes happens on normal Macs, so I let that one slip and downloaded Sunbird instead.

 

Then, I resumed my viewing of Doctor Who with DVD Player. And, guess what? The DVD wouldn't play because DVD Player insisted that the DVD wasn't there. I couldn't quit/force quit the application, and I couldn't unmount the DVD because it was "in use". This wouldn't be too problematic, if I could get my DVD burner to eject the disk while booting up the computer. Now, for all I know, it's stuck there for all eternity.

 

 

So, here are my questions:

 

- should updating to Kalyway 10.5.3 at least solve my DVD problem?

- is this Kalyway's fault, mine, or Apple's?

- do a lot of 'fully working' hackintoshes have these kind of problems that nobody really bothers to mention?

 

- if the above questions have the answers 'no', 'Kalyway's fault', and 'yes', then would I have to bite the bullet and buy an EFiX BPU in order to obtain full stability (yes, I picked my hardware so that EFiX would work as a Plan ?

 

 

Help would be appreciated. Sorry if I sound just a little hostile, but at the moment I'm half-expecting one or two more applications to suddenly die in the same kind of way as iCal; getting up to this point has taken me almost a year and completely drained my financial reserves; and on top of all that, I have a miserable cold.

 

 

 

EDIT: I have since managed to get the DVD out of the drive, and now DVD Player is behaving itself. After checking the preferences for the application, I realised that I had toggled behaviour regarding its reaction to screensavers, and the fact that my desktop IS my screensaver (I love making things look cool, don't you?) may have confused the poor dear program.

 

So it seems that my only problem is with iCal, and that's probably got nothing to do with Kalyway, right?

 

 

So, disregard most of what I said earlier. I've been a bit of a big-headed dolt, for which I apologise. And I'd like to say that I really hand it to you lot for making all this possible.

[(=Nemesis=)]

Apologies for the double post, but it's been a few days.

 

I was installing individual software updates (I think it was for iPhoto and Front Row) and I got a kernel panic half-way through the actual installation.

 

Since then, I've been getting kernel panics every time I boot up. I can't use startup options because if I press F8 or indeed any key at the prompt to "press any key for startup options", nothing happens, and I'm back to another kernel panic.

 

I sort of thought that the apple software updates were OK as long as they weren't operating system updates. Seems not.

 

Although there's nothing I've done on my hackintosh so far that I couldn't duplicate precisely... is there any way for me to fix this? And no, I don't use Time Machine, because I don't have a spare hard disk.