Hacintosh goes Leopard

[Amuso]

After trying out Tiger on my old PC hardware, I also ran Tiger on an HP Pavillion dv1410ea laptop. Everything was supported there except for the wireless network. I think I also applied some GMA900/950 patches to the JaS 10.4.8 install to get native resolutions instead of the 1024x768.

 

The laptop BIOS was hacked to allow another WiFi-card (Atheros) and then everything was great there as well. I used an article on the Internet to get started modifying the BIOS. It involves extracting the current BIOS from the machine to several files using a Phoenix BIOS editor. Then to hunt down and replace the vendor and device IDs in one specific BIOS file. I also had to edit the revision IDs to completly match the new WiFi card. Then it is a matter of building, flashing and crossing your fingers. I have done this twice now for different WiFi cards. If anybody is interested I can make a collection with instructions on how to do it. I assume it will work on most HP/Compaq laptops.

 

I even had the latop dual boot with XP. The only issue was that the external display was detected as the primary in Mac OS, but a single wire jumper in the external VGA connector fixed that. And Windows sometimes messed the screen setup up, so that the Tiger would finally just boot into a blue screen on both screens. I then gave it up and returned it back to Windows XP again.

 

Time went on and Leopard was released. And then it was hacked to run on PC hardware. I just had to get it running on my desktop Hacintosh which now was running Tiger.

 

The hardware was the excact same as for my Tiger. I just removed the Tiger harddrive and installed a fresh new 250GB Hitach drive to do a fresh Leopard install to try with first. Just in case it didn't work, or stuff wasn't supported I could just swap drives back.

 

The installation went fine, but my old graphics card wasnt fully supported so I went out and got a new PCI-Ex16 GeForce 7300GT 256MB card.

 

Since it has been a while since I installed this system, and I will soon do a reinstall. I will have to get back with complete details on how I got it running.

 

For now I can share the sideeffects though.

 

USB drives stopped working after a while. They work if plugged in during power on. Or if I introduce a brand new drive to the system, then it will also recognize all my previous older drives.

 

iTunes and the DVD-drive never gets along. My previous NEC drive suddenly also stopped working, so I got a brand new SATA DVD-burner. But iTunes will not import anything from the drive. It also sometimes has trouble reading discs that work just fine on other machines.

 

My All-in-one printers cannot be used to scan anymore, just print. This is because HP hasnt yet updated their software suite.

 

Finder has started to crash more often. Some programs also just crash or hang.

 

During moving/copying of large files (100s of MBs) the machine freezes during copy several times. It finally finishes, but it is annoying still. Everything else stops during these freezes also.

 

Cameras will no longer be auto-detected, but by swithcing camera mode I can get Mac OS to detect the camera and import into iPhoto.

 

All these sideeffects are also found on the HP dv1410ea laptop which I also installed Leopard on, though another release with PC_EFI.

 

The laptop graphics are also no longer supported by Leopard since it is GMA900/950 based. So MouseLocator is a must, though Microsoft applications are still buggy with MouseLocator. The laptop will probably be returned to its Windows enviroment soon.

 

As for me... I ordred a MacBook Black with 4GB memory to get back into business. USB is kind of vital to me

 

However I will reinstall the desktop PC with Leopard again, or possibly Leopard Server and use it for just that... A server. Updates on that to come!