Ok, with the excellent tips of
LawlessPPC and
lanceomni (great to see those options summed up in one place) I started working on this again and got some nice results.
First of, I used this tutorial to get the iPC distro on a USB flash drive:
How Can I burn The MAC OS X distro to USB flash memory?
This is a real time saver if you are experimenting a lot because it reduces install time to 6/7 minutes.
I also used this guide from
naquaada to create a nice backup/restore system which is also great for experimenting in a safe way to get your stuff working:
Guide: Creating a very safe OS X system
Chipset (nForce 430) and SATA drives:
Selecting AppleNForceATA during install made sure my installation booted but all-tough the DVD drive got recognized it fails to mount any disks.
nfoav8or mentioned somewhere that the "forcedeth AppleNForceATA-test" version (also on the install disk) might solve this but because I have 4Gb in my machine I need to use the "
64Bit adapted AppleNforceATA.kext" and with this one the DVD's also do not mount.
Am I stuck with either 4Gb support or a working SATA DVD drive? Or are there other possibilities?
(I have an external DVD rewriter so it's not a big problem but feels like a waste of hardware)
Audio (ALC662 Audio Codec):
This was a no brainer, the driver is available on the install disk and worked from the start.
Ethernet (PHY Realtek RTL8211B):
LawlessPPC pointed out that Realtek provided Mac drivers but unfortunately not for this one (PHY is the key). The Realtek website tells us this:
Quote:
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RTL8201, RTL8201BL, RTL8201CL, RTL8201CP, RTL8201N and RTL8211B(L) are all PHYceiver. That is a driverless hardware device. Software driver are relative to Network controller ( MAC ) which is integrated into chipset in such case mostly. Please contact your mother board maker or chipset manufacturer to obtain proper driver support.
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So I started searching again but was unable to find any good results.
Then I noticed in the signature of lanceomni the mention of "nForceLAN.kext". Searching for that led me to the
release page on the insanelymac forums where I found out why my previous search efforts failed. That post only mentions the number of the Realtek chip "8211B" and I was searching for "RTL8211B" all the time!
Installed the
nForceLAN.kext and Ethernet started working instantly.
Graphics (NVIDIAŽ GeForce 6150SE):
For the video it looks like I'm screwed. According to this
thread on InsanelyMac there is no solution for shared memory Nvidia cards. LawlessPPC already advised to turn of shared memory but that is not possible with this card. I can turn it down to 32Mb shared memory but it needs at least that.
I tried several Geforce kext's but they all result in a non booting system.
My video needs are not that high, I'm not planning on playing games but I want to at least get rid of the artifacts I have when moving windows and of course a higher resolution.
Any tips on this? Or should I get a dedicated card? (It's a shame my board doesn't do AGP, I have several AGP cards lying around)
So, it looks like I got a fairly stable system with a few important functionalities missing but I'm happy that I got this far already.