After waiting 5 days of downloading, I finally got the installation DVD iso of the sexiest operating system ever – MAC OS X Tiger 10.4.6 for Intel with SSE2 and SSE3 patches for older and new processors support. I didn’t waste much time and I burnt the DVD and freed a partition of 6 GB to have the system installed on.

In the past few days I had some reading about this system and its hardware compatibility to expect the types of problems I might face with my hardware. I was dying to see it and finally it’s here on a DVD

So I rushed and booted the system and I got a nice Apple Icon in the center of the screen and I waited for 5 minutes with complete patience in hope to see the next, the thing which didn’t happen!

Quickly I started searching on the internet and I found two great website http://www.osxx86.info/ http://forum.insanelymac.com then I started searching for how to get the boot log, I found the -v and -x boot options for verbose and safe mode. I discovered that the installer was printing out a message “still waiting for root device”!, After some search I discovered that I should set the DVD and the Harddisk as Master devices (primary master, secondary master). then quickly I had things working but this time with a new error “Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88″, so again quickly to google and I found that it may have millions of reasons! – I tried a very strange one which is reburn the DVD but using the lowest speed 2.4x and surprisingly it worked!!

The Installation was amazing, I had a partition already prepared with 40GB free space and I started the installation, after a happy journey with the installation I discovered that the boot loader couldn’t be installed and the system automatically boots into my GRUB bootloader to Linux/Windows!

I took me 2 hours to discover why. It was because the partition which I had prepared for the installation was a logical partition, not primary!. I found many bad solutions and tried them all but the best one that worked like magic is to copy a file called “chain0″ that’s founded on the installation DVD into your Linux /boot directory, strange yeh?. then add the following lines to your grub.conf

Title MAC OS X Tiger 10.4.6
root (hd0,1)
chainloader /boot/chain0

while (hd0,1) is your root partition for your Linux Box, if you have a separate /boot partition then you can use it and the path for the chainloader will be /chain0 instead of /boot/chain0 . This solution is very clever and it adds the first stage boot loader of the MAC OS X into a file and the GRUB boots it. Suddenly everything has just worked!.

Amazingly things were working good but I had 2 remaining problems. The Screen Resolution and The System is too damn slow!.

I found how to change the screen resolution through a Boot Parameter which is “Graphics Mode”=”1280x1024x32″ and to make it default Open a Terminal from Finder->Applications->Utilities->Terminal and edit the file in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist and add the following lines:

Graphics Mode
1280x1024x32

I used vim to edit the file, and things were going ok till now. I searched for the second problem and I discovered that the MAC is detecting a wrong ACPI version and keeps searching for the correct one continuously!.

The Solution is to set it in the same file:

platform
X86PC
platform
ACPI

Now the MAC OS X is booting in exactly 14 seconds! phew, it’s quite fast!!

I had one another problem that I couldn’t solve till now – The Ethernet Driver…

Let me show you some of my screenshots.

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