MacIntel

Ah, the beauty of OS Y on two heads without having to pay over $2k for just the system.

Last year, I put OS Y on my Thinkpad. But it never ran quite smoothly because of the lack of SSE 3 support.

Having a MacBook Pro really helped in convincing me of the switch. Long ago, I made a commitment that if a UNIX variant ever had a nice GUI, I would switch. While I am fairly UNIX savvy, it's just a little painful to run as your main box and without the mainstream apps.

This year, I put a new PC together. Up until now, my main desktop was a P3 with rambus ram. I was pretty careful in picking the hardware, especially the video card. I choose the ATI 1900GT. Figuring that Apple supported the 1900XT officially, and it shouldn't be a problem. Well, WRONG!

So here is my documentation on how to put Aqua on. It doesn't take that long, about 8 hours of work. I got everything I wanted to work: dual head, full QT and IC support so VLC plays DVDs and OpenGL stuff works as well.

Couple of things to remember.
1. You might want to get a second drive that you can experiment with. Just in case you blow stuff away by accident. Didn't happen to me, but if your end product is a fully working system (I fully intent on replacing Windows), why not put it on a separate drive?

2. This worked for my system and I have little clue if it would work on anything else.
Core2 Duo
Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 motherboard
Marvell Yukon ethernet
AC97 Azalia
ATI 1900GT 256MB from Sapphire

What you will need:
10.4.8 jAs distro
10.4.9 Jas update
AzaliaAudio.pkg.zip
Natit_edited.kext.zip

Installation Steps
1. Install the OS from DVD without selecting the ATI fixes. If you pick the ATI fixes, you will get a blck screen after reboot. A post from jAs suggested that the fix might be incompatible with the video card. You should get 1024x768 after you have gone thru all the installation steps here.
2. Next take care of the network card and audio. Follow this step-by-step guide. (I printed out the directions ahead of time.) I followed steps 9 thru 17. Skipping Step 13.
3. Use this approach. Since it's not as easy to read, understand and has a mistake, I modified it a bit. Here is what I used.
-Get natit_edited
-You will need to copy your Device and manufacture id of ur card (About this mac -> More info -> Graphics / Displays). Mine was 0x724B1002 where 0x denotes it's a hex value and 724B is the device id and 1002 is the manufacture id.
-Open natit.kext and edit plist file, find your model, and change the device id with the correct one.
-Copy natit.kext to /System/Library/Extensions
- Edit Info.plist in /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX1000.kext/Contents.
- find IOPCIMatch
- add 0x724b1002 in the string section. (this is where I got tripped up. The original guide fouled up here)

-Go into the terminal, browse to /System/Library/Extensions and type:
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
sudo chown -R root:wheel Natit.kext
sudo chmod -R 0755 /System/Library/Extensions
diskutil repairPermissions /

-Reboot and enjoy!