DIY Hackintosh Tutorial: Build a Mac Pro for Cheap
Posted by Darwinian on 01/19/08 in Articles, Featured, Hardware, Tutorial
Extra Driver Installs (Video & Wifi)
Back to reality. My machine was booting up for the first time with its new OS. Oops what’s this? The Darwin Bootloader again. This time don’t press any buttons. You shouldn’t need to specify any startup options. Just let it do its thing!
So far so good. We have the usual gray screen back again.
Ok so I had to suffer through all that Welcome and Wilcommen crap during the OS X intro. The good news here is the sound was working right out-of-the-box. After all the welcome stuff it finally boots into OS X and the desktop starts up.
Now it’s really time to sit back and reflect on a job well done. My mind sort of flashed back to all of the boneheads that would rant about their uber PowerMacs and Mac Pros and make a point of repeating how expensive and fast they were. I had finally stuck it to them. That monkey was finally off my back. How stupid will those suckers feel now. All that money they spent while my Mac Pro cost at least 3 times less than theirs at the same spec level. Feel free to do ROFL-copters now.
Don’t get too excited yet though as we’re not quite done here. It’s time to get the video card working properly. Currently it’s in some generic mode with only one resolution. I found a package by Scott Dangel that installed a few nice things along with the necessary stuff to make my video card function properly. He apparently made it for Leopard 10.5.2 but it worked nicely on the 10.5.1 system I just installed. Download the package and install it. Here is what you should see after this package successfully installs.
You will need to reboot after it’s done. Before it reboots the system says it needs to update some sort of boot cache first. Click Ok. I run dual Samsung Syncmaster 225BW’s. I am happy to report that after the reboot it automatically started at its maximum resolution on both monitors. Feel free to check your Display settings in System Preferences to revel in all the available resolutions and dual screen compatibility. I know I did.
Ok, all that remains to tackle now is getting that onboard WiFi working. Thanks to the guys at RealTek for providing an OS X driver for us to use - Grab it here. On that page you’ll see lots of drivers for different operating systems. Windows, Linux etc. Under the heading for “Other” you will see one labeled as follows: MacOS, Tiger, 10.4 Driver 1.4.5, UI 1.4.7 ( Support Both of Intel and PowerPC Platforms).
Once you download it you will need to install it. Just follow the directions. Click click click. A reboot ensues after installing these drivers. When it boots back up you will see a nice little message from RealTek informing you that you will need to enable the WLAN card in the Network section of System Preferences.
You’ll also notice there’s a Realtek WLAN Client Utility that’s running. If you click anywhere except on that window it will minimize itself to the dock and look like some weird blue scorpion thing. Now let’s go to System Preferences and Choose Network. You will see a screen like this.
At the bottom of the left pane is a + sign. Press it to add a new device. A dialog will pop up that asks you to select the interface and give it a name. Choose the second item called “Ethernet” in the list and give it a name of WiFi. After you’re done there its important to click the “Apply” button.
Now click the blue scorpion in the dock to look at the WLAN Client utility again. If all went well you should now see a MAC address and some other details.
Now let’s look at all this on both monitors. By the way these monitors cost me $199 each after rebate, about 6 months ago.
And finally we’ll see how does this system stack up against similarly configured Apple hardware…
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