Aspire 6930 iATKOS

[Chaos Storm]

For those who want an easy way to install Mac OS to an Intel Aspire 6930, here is how:

 

Use iATKOS, latest version, I think V7 is the latest for Leopard.

 

When booting from DVD, you must use these boot arguments (Press F8)

 

-v cpus=1 acpi=off platform=legacy

 

If you don't it won't boot. Once it boots you can format your drive with Disk Utility and install Leopard.

 

The default selection of packages is OK, but you will want to add a few items by selecting PS/2 Voodoo Driver (First One Listed), Intel EFI String (nothing else for graphics), Battery Driver, Intel Speedstep Driver, Intel AHCI Driver, Jmicron (Can't remember if this notebook has Jmicron, so I didn't want to forget this in case)

 

What works:

 

Audio

Volume Touch Keys & Rewind/Reverse Buttons ONLY

Card Reader

Battery Indicators

 

To get graphics working download attached kext and it will enable a Framebuffer video driver which will adjust resolution, however do note DVD playback won't work due to the fact there is no hardware acceleration. However iTunes will play MP4 media just fine. You can watch movies in windowed mode but going fullscreen may start dropping frames. Sorry I don't recall where on the forum this FB driver came from, but credit goes to the author as it also has a software cursor to avoid artifacts. You will notice slower mouse polling/speed.

 

There does seem to be an issue with these notebooks and alternate Wifi cards as I have tried multiple cards and although OSX does properly identify them and they are listed in ioreg, they won't activate. Still looking into that.

AppleIntelGMAX3100FB.kext.zip

[Chaos Storm]

Update:

 

The reason the wireless and ethernet devices do not work is that they are not enumerated properly. Comparing ioreg -l with the Acer 6930 and my HP DV6000, I see that the Acer simply lists pci14e4,3411 whereas the HP has something like SXSY@0.

 

Apparently this is due to ACPI and the fact Acer has moved to a new platform for this series of notebooks.

 

If you edit the DSDT you may be able to get your wireless device to show up as a Generic PCI device, but you would still need a way to inject drivers.

 

If I find anything else out I will post here.