MAC OSX Leopard on HP NW8440

With two recent events I got interested in trying out Mac OSX. One was The Making of South Park - 6 Days to Air and the other was the passing of the late Steve Jobs. I really like South Park and in the documentary it showed that they use Macs for just about everything. I got to thinking that it would be fun to try but I have no intention of buying a Mac just to test it out. I just want to test the software and have no interest in the hardware.

If you want to try out OSX I recommend starting with VMware permitting that your hardware is compatible with running OSX in VMware. 

I did very little research before jumping in. I jumped on some different Hackintosh websites/forums and looked around for about a hour and then just started trying to install Kalyway 10.5.2 onto an HP NW8440.

This turned into a little bit of a trick because the computer would sometimes not recognized the DVD I made of Kalyway 10.5.2 as bootable and other times it would start to load the DVD and then suddenly power off in an instant. With several boot attempts the NW8440 finally booted the DVD completely and I was able format my HDD with the built in disc utility and then install Mac OSX 10.5.2 Kalyway onto the machine without selecting any customization options during the installation.

This gets you a working Mac for doing very little since it is not up to date.

The resolution is not that high because there is no proper graphics driver installed. The resolution is 1024x768 which is usable.

iTunes and almost all apps are not up to date and a lot of features are not usable because of this. I proceeded to attempt to resolve the issues. I started by disabling Software Update because I do not want official Apple updates coming in and messing up my installation unless I give it the okay to use updates from Apple.

To update to the latest Leopard version of OSX I used iDeneb combo upgrade 10.5.8. I only did the upgrade and did not use the other files that came with the iDeneb update. After that I used software update manually to update all the apps on the computer.

The audio was not working at all so I did this:

Installed appleazaliaaudioadi1981_installer.v2.zip that I found here:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...76288&st=40 . I did not delete any files as is suggested in the topic. This got the built in speaker/mute/volume working only. No headphone jacks work.

After that here are the results:

What is known to not work/has issues at this point:

1. Screen only has 1024x768 resolution.

2. Audio out jack. Headphones do not have sound when plugged in and built in speakers continue to play sound.

3. Built in mic and mic input jack are not recognized.

4. minor boot issue. requires multi attempts to boot. Failure to boot occurs at many different places. Each boot attempt is different. Most common failure is just after the Darwin press any key to enter options screen the computer suddenly powers down

5. Scrolling with touchpad

6. Sleep mode/screen sleep is not quite right.

Untested:

1. VGA output. I assume it has problems from my reading.

2. NIC ethernet port. I assume this does not function as well from my reading but have not tested.

Possible nic fix. I have not tested because I do not want to screw up where I am o far and I have wireless working so I am content for the moment.

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=47078

3. Card Reader

4. Expansion card slot

5. Firewire

All in all it was a fun little project and I will only continue to test and hopefully get the head phone jacks working.