[jimmydean]

I had a few PC's running Tiger before I left Intel, but they were just play things. I love my Powerbook G4 that I would like to buy something for "personal" use. Looking at the price of the MacBooks and OUCH! irate2:

Is there somewhere that shows a list of desired PC platform for x86 OS X? I would like to get a nice laptop to run it, but I'm not sure where to start looking.

 

[jimmydean]

Got it! This is the hook up right here! I am going to get me a nice Thinkpad in a week or so and set this up:

how-to triple boot Vista/OSX86/Ubuntu

Nice!

 

[binary visions]

FYI, you may have to hack in driver support for some things. I installed OSX on my desktop and had to fuss with the NVIDIA drivers, including some manual editing of configuration files, in order to get it to work.

 

[jimmydean]

Thanks for the heads up, BV.

I was looking at the list of supported hardware and recomended setups. I like the idea of the Thinkpad because I have had 3 now without issues. I can get a nice T43 on the cheap.

I was also looking at referb MacBooks for less than a Grand. I might just suck it up and get one because I like my Powerbook so much. Then just install Vista in a few months and call it good.

 

[Discostu]

I've got two of my systems now running with full OS X support.

My notebook is a mitac 8050 (pentium m based with 855g chipset and radeon 9700 pro video). I put a dell truemobile 1450 wireless mini pci card in it and now everything is fully supported. I'm using Callisto for full quartz/core image acceleration and native 1280x800 res support. This is a dual boot 10.4.8/win xp setup.

On my desktop system I have an Asus P5b mobo, pentium d 820 (soon to be e6300), 3gb ddr2 and an Ati X1900 AIW. This too has full hardware support with QE/CI acceleration from the boris badenov patch. This system is a Vista Beta 2, Win Xp, OS X triple boot. Each OS has its own hd. I still have to work on the hd performance in os x, the ICH8 southbridge on the mobo isn't playing nicely right now, but overall it works great.

My suggestion for a notebook is to stick to Intel on everything except wireless. GMA 950 graphics, core 2 cpu, broadcom based wireless (ie $10 dell truemobile from ebay).

As long as you stick with these basic parts you should have no problems getting os x running smoothly. Stay away from nvidia graphics cards as BV mentioned. Unless a lot of progress is made very quickly, you won't get full support. You might get res changing ability with titan/macvidia , but no one has gotten QE/CI working on any nvidia card in a pc yet. ATI is hit and miss, the x1900/x1800/x1600 series usually work well, but its not guaranteed. On a notebook the gma950 is the way to go for sure.

The most painless OS X installing experience I ever had was with on an asus 915g based desktop board with gma 900 graphics and a pentium 4 520. Everything detected automatically and worked out of the box.

The best resource out there for this stuff is insanelymac.com , but let me know if you have any more questions, I've set up OS X on a lot of pc's now with many different hardware set ups so I may have some info on a specific problem you encounter.

 

[jimmydean]

That's great! I am way too familiar with the Intel 855/915 chipsets. I worked for a year on the Linux drivers for those chipsets and know the ins and outs. I'll take a look at those and go from there.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Discostu]

945g works great too if you want to go for something newer that can run a core 2 duo. You will just have to do some driver .plist file editing to get the HD audio to work.