Anyone have any experience with a Dell Vostro A100 Intel Atom system as a hackintosh?

 

 

I saw a listing on ebay for a barebone Dell Vostro A100 for $125 with free shipping, and it intrigued me.

When I used google to search for this model I got this page from Dell

Vostro A100 Mini Tower

apparently this model was sold only in Europe and it came with Ubuntu Linux installed.

From the Tech Description It sounds like it has a D945 Mini-ITX motherboard installed, but I’m not sure which model.

This sounds like it might be a good system to turn into a Hackintosh. It would be funny as hell to show this one to your friends and co-workers sitting there running OSX Leopard on a ……GASP! Dell computer system.

The only thing I didn’t like about this one it that it doesn’t appear to have a IDE Port so it would require a SATA Hard Drive, and a SATA DVD , CD-RW DVD Combo, or DVD Burner Optical Drive and a stick of DDR2 Memory.

If anyone has used this model from Dell can you leave comments about it and let me know how it works as a hackintosh system?

Installing a PCI Nvidia 8400 GS graphics card on a D945GCLF

Otherwise known as how to really screw up your OSX Leopard Installation

Because the onboard Intel GMA950 video card on my Intel D945GCLF isn’t able to decode Hulu video smoothly (jumps and jerks) I got the brilliant idea to purchase a Sparkle Nvidia 8400 GS 256 meg PCI video card for my Hackintosh, this should give it a nice little boost, and OSX Likes Nvidia graphics cards right?

WRONG!

I have reloaded my system twice now, and have tried adding EFI strings for my video card, and have tried Netkas’s ATY_Init Injector found here http://netkas.org/?p=107

without either of these methods I get a 1024x768 display with severe visual artifacts, smears,etc. on screen.

after I use either method to get my 8400 gs recognized by the system I lose system stability. My system randomly freezes for no apparent reason. After doing a little research I determined that OSX is recognizing my PCI video card as a PCI Express video card and this most likely is why OSX is flipping out.

Thank god for Carbon Copy Cloner, I cloned my hard drive on my hackintosh before I installed the new video card so this evening I will be removing this PCI video card and then restoring my hard drive to before the new card was installed, this will put me back to when my system ran great other than the hulu problem.

 

Anyone want to buy a used 8400 GS PCI video card???

DUBL: Darwin Universal Boot Loader

I got a interesting newsletter email from Psystar today that had an article about a new graphical boot loader that they will be using with all of their systems as of July 1st called DUBL: Darwin Universal Boot Loader

As of July 1st all new Psystar computers will feature our exclusive DUBL graphical bootloader technology. In the coming weeks existing Psystar customers will be able to upgrade thier current systems via the OpenRestore application provided your system is under warranty. Upon its availability to existing customers, you will be notified via email. Shortly after that we are planning an open source release for the general public.

New Features

• Graphical boot menu
• Advanced XNU option support
• Automatic detection of multiple OS's
• Legacy IDE ATAPI support

I fully believe that Psystar is using code from PC EFI and Chameleon’s EFI software, but I think it’s a good step in the right direction that they are taking in that they are going to release an open source version of the Darwin Universal Boot Loader software.
Since a large majority of their software was derived from Open Source OSX86 software and drivers, the least they can do is share their changes to the code.
Good for you Psystar, You may just have won me back as a future Customer if I ever get tired of tinkering with and building my own Hackintosh computers.