Considering building a Hackintosh out of a DEll XPS 410
beingzoe 2 months ago
//
2 responses
//
Digital Life Gibber-gabber
I have wanted to switch to MAC for a while.
Unfortunately I have not been in the position to make what would be for me a potentially expensive move. All new hardware, software, etc… And for the joy and class of a MAC you pay, a lot.
Recently our good friends the HappyCamperBus decided to abandon the work-a-day world to travel around the country (world???) in a VW bus. As part of this goal they were committed to giving up all earthly possessions that would not fit in the van. Much of these items were sold on ebay or yard sales. But some of them were donated to friends and family. Our friend Alan was given the gift of a DELL XPS 410 (duo-core). A big improvement over his now ancient Pentium 4. The DELL however uses the new BTX form factor for the motherboard, and the configuration made it so the motherboard could not be used in Alan’s rack mounted computer rig. Thus he took the chip and bought a new motherboard that would work. So I have inherited the case, motherboard, and ram.
This is a great deal for me as it cuts a lot of the base costs for me to build a new computer. Like Alan I had waited so long to upgrade I was going to have to replace most of the internal components such as video card, at least one hard drive, ram, and so on. The video card being the biggest deal as I need a high powered video card with dual DVI out and the best video cards are not cheap.
So it looked like my dreams of switching to a MAC were still somewhere in the future. But as I consulted with one of my business partners he suggested doing a hackintosh install.
A hackintosh install?
From the Wiki:
OSx86 (a portmanteau of OS X and x86) is a collaborative hacking project to run the Mac OS X computer operating system on non-Apple personal computers with x86 architecture processors. The effort started soon after the June 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference announcement that Apple would be transferring their personal computers from PowerPC to Intel microprocessors.
A computer built to run this type of Mac OS X is sometimes known as a Hackintosh, which is a recycled term originally denoting the modified Lisa 2/10 running Mac System.
So I began doing some research. Would this really work? Could I build a MAC for nearly a third of the cost?
That remains to be seen. I have more research to do as I finish buying my components today. If I go ahead with this I will let you know how it goes. Though I am a little leary of the whole thing, mainly due to the fact that the computer used to be a DELL and who knows what kind of funny proprietary drivers might be involved to make the onboard gigabit NIC and audio (7.1 surround onboard – alright).
If any of you have built hackintoshes I would love to hear your stories and see some pics.
I will keep you up-to-date.
Hack Macs image courtesy of Bascht at Flickr under a creative commons license.
Responses
Sorry for the delayed update.
The Hackintosh install failed on the first attempt.
While the process was relatively painless to experiment with, it didn’t get past the experimental stage.
Unfortunately the Dell bios does not allow enough fine tune settings to easily pull this off. By easily I mean, though there were only a handful of combinations I could have tried (bios and kernels) there were enough, without anything specific to control that at an hour plus to configure, install, and test per combination it could have taken days.
There were two key reasons I did not try more than one attempt.
It would never really be a MAC
This isn’t just me being prissy. It wouldn’t be a MAC, by appearance, by true upgradeability, or by any legal standard.
Not to say if it has worked out of the gate, I wouldn’t have given it a go to see how it worked out. However, there would always be that lingering thought in the back of my mind anytime something went wrong (and things go wrong even with a MAC :) that it was due to the “hack” part of the “intosh”.
Survey says, “This ain’t gonna work on this Dell”
I did a considerable amount of research to determine how to proceed and what pitfalls to avoid. There many useful articles and tips. But the damning resource in my case was a MAC forum discussion (can’t find the original thread/post but I’m pretty sure it was the insanelyMac forums ) about the exact model number I have (thanks to the HappyCamperBus ).
In this person’s case they were going on weeks in trying to get it to work. Every step of the way they had basically seemed to get it working and then something catastrophic would happen and they would have to start over. At one point after weeks of posting, in a long thread, the struggling invidual posted, exasperated, “I’m right back where I started three weeks ago!”
So in my case I made an unspoken vow that this would not be me. It was either going to work right away or I was sticking with Windows XP.
In retrospect I regret not at least giving it three trys as this would have only eaten up one evening even if it failed. But even if it did work, my first problem with the Hackintosh would plague me.
So I am currently doing everything I can to wean myself off of Windows products and using more cross platform options, web services , and other things that will make it so I will be able to move to a real MAC sometime in the future without the headaches and hassles that would have come had the Hackintosh install been successful at this time.
Thanks for following along.
Start a new discussion
About the author
Digital Life blog topics
About this community
About posting to community blogs
© 2007 CoTradeCo, Coachella Valley Packaging, & Coachella Valley Trading Company
are part of the Shorebird Corporation in partnership with [ i ] motion creative
Community content is all rights reserved © by the contibutor of that content granting
CoTradeCo some limited non-exclusive usage rights, see our policies.
Woo-hoo! HappyCamperBus says ‘Go for the Gold’, er, I mean the Hackintosh. We are really dying to see what happens!
Good luck and god’s speed.