Some Success w/Dell 8400

[39thRonin]

I've been playing around with OSX x86 for a couple of weeks now, and after a couple of hairy crashes (and OSX re-loads) I'm reporting that it's mostly been a success. My current install came from the "Generic" DVD release, and installation was a snap (except for one -x start to clean out the ATI kexts)

 

 

First my hardware:

 

Hardware Overview:

 

Machine Name: Apple Development Platform

Machine Model: ADP2,1

CPU Type: Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU

Number Of CPUs: 1

CPU Speed: 2.99 GHz

L2 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB

Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled

CPU Features: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT PSE36 CLFSH DS ACPI MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM SSE3 MON DSCPL TPR

Memory: 1 GB

Bus Speed: 3.2 GHz

Boot ROM Version: A07 (Dell Inc.)

 

I don't have any sound - using a stupid SB Live! 24 bit card - but I'm looking for a good USB alternative that will allow me to use iTunes, et. al. iTunes works, needless to say, without sound, but I do get the Visualizer.

 

Display:

 

Type: VGA-Compatible Controller

Bus: PCI

Slot: PCI_1

Vendor: ATI (0x1002)

Device ID: 0x5964

Revision ID: 0x0001

Kernel Extension Info: No Kext Loaded

Displays:

Display:

Resolution: 1280 x 1024

Depth: 32-bit Color

Core Image: Not Supported

Main Display: Yes

Mirror: Off

Online: Yes

Quartz Extreme: Not Supported

 

 

I have 1280x1024x32 display without CoreImage support - hence, no Quartz... The bummer is that my card is a Radeon 9200 pci, with 128Mb RAM - which would be nice to use...

 

One weird thing I noticed is that OSX correctly id's my graphics before boot - during the "countdown", but can't after boot... Any pointers to why that is the case?

 

Overall Impressions:

 

I've been a Unix guy for a long time - back when the Sun 3/50 was state-of-the-art. So, the BSDisms of OSX are fine - it was good to use ps -ax versus ps-ef! All-in-all this is a very quick box, - much nicer to use (even with an occasional ATSserver crash) than the XP on another partition. One cool thing I liked about OSX (there are many, but this really struck me) was how it found and correctly id'd my networked HP printer.

 

I like this OS/GUI. For me, it is fast, runs all the apps I generally NEED (Firefox, Thunderbird, burns CDs and DVD really well, BBedit text editor, etc.) I wish that Apple would realize that there are many, many people just like me who would help build a REAL alternative to M$. I'd buy this software, and will dedicate one of my machines to running it exclusively.

 

Later...

 

jb