Lion working well on a very old system

[Baldrick45]

Anyone out there with older kit who was considering trying Lion? Go for it ! You'll be surprised what you can get away with.

 

I'm running a very old Gigabyte board (GAP31-DS3L) (Socket 775 mobo) with a C2D processor, 4G RAM and NVidia 8800GT video card.

 

I've been running Leopard and then Snow Leopard as my main OS for 2 years but had found Snow Leo gave me a few probs (particularly with the last few updates) so using a 2nd HDD as a safety precaution I tried installing Lion last weekend.

 

I installed using the Tonymac method - update to latest Chimera bootloader - XMover to prep my installer (although I used a USB stick rather than a separate HDD partition.) - Install and then run [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] to make the Lion disk bootable.

 

It was soooo easy I was gobsmacked!

 

I have Lion working with QE/CI on the graphics (just from "graphicsenabler=y") LAN working with the drivers provided on [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url] and sound (at the minute just with Voodoo but confident that I should get proper ALC888 support with some more time to tweak my DSDT file).

 

I used my Snow Leo DSDT since my board is too old to be supported by DSDT Auto-patcher or to be found in any of the libraries of pre-edited DSDT files. I had spend a lot of time previously hand editing my DSDT in Snow Leo and had managed to get all the obvious fixes in and even to eliminate every compilation warning so it was pretty solid.

 

Whether this made a big difference to my smooth install or not, I don't know but the only things in my Lion E/E are the DSDT file and Fakesmc, in S/L/E the only addition has been VoodooHDA.

 

Even the MacStore worked first time for me accepting my old iTunes account details and letting me DL Stuffit Expander and a few other Utils straight away.

 

Soooo - Another non-event in many ways. Lion installs on old Intel/NVidia kit - Big deal!

 

Well, the fact that it runs and runs well on 4-5 year old kit, giving an even more vanilla install than I had under Snow Leo may surprise some and encourage them to give it a go too.

 

Huge thanks to TonyMac, Macman and all those involved in Chimera, [url="http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/279450-why-insanelymac-does-not-support-tonymacx86/"]#####[/url], xMove and all the enhancements to Chameleon over the last couple of years. That you have taken running OSX from being a bit of a "tech-guru hack-fest" to being so extremely straightforward amazes me and always makes me smile each time my "Hack" boots into life.

 

Thanks too to all InsanelyMac users who held my hand (virtually) through previous installs and helped me gain the little knowledge and confidence I now have to try things for myself.

 

Winblows (Bleughhh) - Even when it goes wrong this is still so much more fun !!!

[Shane Hsu]

Old!? Core 2 Duo isn't problem, since it has the base architecture Core 2 Quad is based on. And Core 2 Quad wasn't considered very outdated, just outdated. Think of things this way, if you own a Core 2 Quad machine, you wouldn't necessarily have to upgrade to Core i series.

It's always the Graphics most people have problems with, at least for me. 8800 is as well, considered outdated, but met 7900GS on my machine, which is very outdated, consider the face that NO Hardware-Accelerated H.264, no OpenCL, what the hell!

Don't put the word OLD out too fast, you haven't met your match!!