Running OSX on My Regular Computer

[Dopefish]

Let me update this thread with some of my experiences so far.

Updating from 10.5.2 to 10.5.3 was a little tricky and required several reinstalls before I got it working. I used a combo updater put out my “Mysticus C.” This was the only updater that worked for me. The other updaters would only partially update the system or lock it up in the middle, which would result in kernel panics upon restart.

Once that was done, I switched over to using some EFI strings for my hardware rather than using injectors. The only injectors I used previously were for the video and audio. Using EFI strings is a way of getting OSX to see your hardware and support it natively. It’s a bit tricky and I used this guide (it may require registration; I don't remember) to add strings for my video and audio. This way you can actually remove the injectors from your system altogether, which speeds up the boot process and makes your OSX behave more like a real Mac.

I (mostly) solved the problem with not being able to boot with both cores enabled. The problem was only partially related to the NIC. The real problem was actually the drivers for the nForce SATA controller. I had noticed that when the system locked up, it wasn’t really locked up; it was just in an unresponsive state. Windows still updated, the pinwheel still spun around, and the terminal window I had open still had stuff going on. Seeing the terminal window respond let me get the idea of watching the system logs when it locked up. So I figured the problem out by booting with both cores enabled, then setting up a scenario that would guarantee a lockup. Before I made the system lockup, I ran “tail -f /var/log/system.log” from the terminal to watch what was going on when the system locked up. When it locked up, a bunch of strings that looked like “Macintosh kernel[0]: disk2s2: data underrun.” started popping up after a couple minutes. This told me the problem was related to the SATA drivers and not the NIC drivers. The guy who wrote the drivers, MeDevil, had released an updated “TEST” driver that was meant to fix some SATA DVD drives. I decided to give these drivers a shot and surprisingly, the system no longer locked up under the same scenario.

However, there were still problems with the onboard NIC. With both cores enabled, the system would now freeze with any network activity. Since I haven’t got the Intel NIC working yet in OSX, and I didn’t feel like putting my RealTek 8139 back in to test some more, I got the idea of using FireWire. Since I have my real Mac right next to my PC, I just ran a firewire cable between the two, enabled internet sharing on the real Mac, and that was it. My network now works flawlessly and I can use both cores.

The SATA drivers are still not perfect and I can get the system to lockup when doing work with large files. As long as I don’t try to edit 8 GB files, the system will boot and work flawlessly.

The only thing left to solve, which I don't think can be solved with my motherboard, is enabling the use of the HPET. The use of this is kept inside the power management kext, which will not load on many, many, many systems. Loading this kext will almost always guarantee a kernel panic.

[panic!]

I wasn't planning on upgrading, but my Asus P5N-E SLI took a crap, so I did some research and bought a Gigabyte EP35-DS3R.

I cheated though, I got my friend to come over and help me install and patch it. He has everything down, so he got me installed off Vanilla and updated to 10.5.3 pretty easily. Finding the patcher for my audio was kind of a pain, but it was the only onboard component that didn't work out of the box. My mic isn't working at the moment, but I'll figure that out later.

I also got to figure out this mouse issue too, it really bugs me.

[Craig]

man thats awesome guys. I would love to have OS X on my tower in a virtual install.

[panic!]

I don't know about virtual. I'm just running it off a spare sata drive. If I want to boot into Windows I just have to select the drive on boot.

I keep hitting all kinds of crazy ass short cuts.

My OSX desktop!

[Dopefish]

Good stuff, man. If you're using on-board audio, it might be best to try and use an EFI string so you don't need a patcher/injector. This would really keep it as vanilla as possible.

I recommend buying Paragon NTFS for OS X and MacDrive for Windows so you can easily read/write between NTFS and HFS+. I don't know how familiar you are with UNIX, but you can stop all those drives from mounting automatically by adding them to /etc/fstab.

You'll figure out how to tweak and make everything nice.

I find your Adium contact list is dumb. You have them sorted into groups based on their network, but then you show the service icons for the network. It's like a waste of space to put that there. Personally, I could care less what network someone is on. I sort my list by status, then alphabetical. That's all there is to it. This is the style I use: Adium - Xtras - View Xtra: SimpleStatusList ... It basically lets you get rid of the status and service icons so you only see their avatar and name. The background color of the contact designates their status, and the service icons are useless to begin with.

[panic!]

A few of my drives are fat32, so I don't mind them being up there. I'll have to remove some of them though.

I haven't totally finished with Adium yet. I downloaded simplestatuslist, but everything is still grouped by messenger. With digsby I had it all sorted by person, so it didn't have multiple names. I haven't figured out how to do that with adium yet.

//
I got it figured out now, just had to remove the service icons, dur.

[panic!]

I got a program called USB Overdrive and it fixed the acceleration issue, and now it even sees my mouse as a Boomslang CE 2007.

[Craig]

Ya I wanted to try that but even I can't justify $20 for a stinking driver )-:

[panic!]

There's a trial you can get of it I think. It definitely helped a ton.

[Dopefish]

I use my free solution to fix mouse acceleration.