Playing with OSX86
December 11, 2007

Some of you may have noticed that my posting frequency has severely plummeted and I've sort of dropped off the series of tubes. It's true, I've been super busy with non-Internet related things. So busy, in fact, that my main workstation is torn apart and is being rebuilt at the moment. A friend of mine recently got ahold of a nice shiny copy of OSX for his PC. Well, not to be shy I of course listened closely to his tales and will relate to you the story all about how his life got flipped turned upside down.

The installation boot process actually went very smoothly - so smoothly in fact that it was decided to just go ahead and wipe the disk and start from scratch. Alas, OSX would have none of this. It would seem that the SATA controller was not recognized properly and ended up going AWOL every time any sort of drive activity was attempted.

I tried formatting the disk every which way, but it would simply keep timing out. How long was the time out? Almost a full hour did it sit at "Preparing to Erase". I also discovered that even Ubuntu Linux 7.10 has issues with my SATA controller and it took good old fdisk to even begin to partition the drive correctly. Note to Ubuntu Live CD Users With Display Issues: Boot Graphics Safe Mode with the added boot parameter (F6) "vga=771" might just help you out.

One fruitless night of labor later it was decided to simply remove the SATA disk and replace it with a plain old IDE. Loe, the install then worked smooth as things that are smooth. Sadly, this is not the end of our tale.

First boot yielded a nice kernel panic which forced me to go about the arduous task of tracking down what caused it. Offhand, it seems to have been NVDRESMAN.kext which was causing me issues - and simply moving it out of the Library directory rectified that situation. However, what that left me with was a depressing 1024x768 pixels of resolution on both my monitors.

Unacceptable. So the saga will continue... next stop - the MacVidia project!

Update - 2007/12/10

Sadly my foray into OSX86 has ended badly. I managed to get everything else working with a myriad of custom drivers and hacked packages, my display continually eluded me. My final attempt at getting MacVidia to run caused the whole display subsystem to fail and wouldn't boot at all. At that point, I realized that it was just too much work to get something running that I wouldn't even keep around. So sad. Oh well.