-Mike

Thanks for taking the time to sit down and work this out, I’ve previously done the same, but not found the time to post it up.

So here is what I am going to do - my next article, Part 5 of this series, is going to be excerpts of your comments here, published and formatted appropriately as the blog entry. You’ll be credited, of course.

Thanks again!

instead of

rm -d ./NV*

it should be

rm -rd ./NV*

This is important

-Mike

I’ve got a Dell Inspiron 8200, and Ive read that these two machines are 99% the same hardware so, I followed your guide, and VOILA, a beautiful osx screen staring me in the face, but might I say, too fuzzy at 1200*800.

SO, I’ve figured a way to get macvidia drivers working on the GeForce4 440 Go, and it was a real pain to figure out, but easy once you know how. Here’s how I did it.

To download MacVidia drivers, you need to register, sorry, I couldn’t find a way around it. Go to the download section and stay away from the installers, go directly to the driver releases. Download MacVidia NV Driver 1.0.7 (beta 2 build 2). This is the only driver I have been able to make work so far (PS, no cl or qe support in this version.)

The files are NVidia.kext and NVdriver.kext. They need to go in /System/Library/Extensions/, and the IONDRVSupport.kext needs to find a new home somewhere else. So do this from the osx gui.

Copy NVidia.kext and NVdriver.kext to /System/Library/Extensions/. It will nag about authentication, just put your admin password in.

The Next step is to move IONDRVSupport.kext to someplace safe, in my example i moved it /kextsave because believe me, if this doesnt work for you, you’re going to be glad you saved it!

in terminal:

sudo bash
(then enter your admin password)
mkdir /kextsave
mv /System/Library/Extensions/IONDRVSupport.kext /kextsave

Now we have to repair permissions in terminal

cd /System/Library/Extensions/
chown -R root:wheel ./NV*
chmod -R 755 ./NV*

Now that we’re sure that the permissions are right, we clean up the extension caches so this baby will fire up when we reboot.

rm -f /System/Library/Extensions*
(ignore the directory error)

After this, its really up to you what you’d like to do, reboot or test. I tested to see if the kext would load first and got some strange black screen, rebooted and my screen came back, with the new driver!
What I did was,

kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/NVidia.kext

at this point my screen went black. what we’re looking for is anything in the terminal that suggests the kext will load. if you have dependency errors, its definitely a permissions error, go back and follow my directions about permissions exactly.

ok, i prayed for you, did the screen come back after a reboot? If it did, you can go to the system preferences > displays > set to 1600*1200. I hope so, but if it didnt, I’d like to un-screw up your computer because I feel guilty.

boot into single user mode by hitting F8 and enter ” -s ” and let it do its thing, then type

/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /System/Library/Extensions/
mv /kextsave/IONDRVSupport.kext/ ./
rm -d ./NV*
chown -R root:wheel ./IONDRVSupport.kext
chmod -R 755 ./IONDRVSupport.kext
rm -f /System/Library/Extensions*
(ignore the error)
rmdir /kextsave
reboot
wait a while

I hope everybody loves the 1600*1200ness of your new dell. Now, somebody get this infernal Truemobile 1500 (Orinoco Gold) wireless card going!

-Mike

If I find it, you can be assured it will make it into the part five article.

Well, I’m a bit disappointed you didn’t read part three ( http://www.thereformed.org/2007/04/30/howto-mac-osx-dell-latitude-c840-part-3/ ), as I’ve specifically gone into how to resolve the built-Ethernet issue altogether.

As for the update to 10.4.9, there are so many variants of the 10.4.9 update, it may or may not work. Personally, I just used the stand-alone Delta Installer from Apple’s software update website. You kind find some tutorials on how to do this on Insanely Mac and I might write one myself here at a later date.

Wanted to say thanks for the walkthrough , I did wonder if i could ever get the mac os on such a old laptop but it worked a treat. The old problem i had and subsiquently the reason i uninstalled os x was the lack of display driver support. Osx it’s self worked fine but no decent drivers ment it lagged sometimes in performace and i could not use any games or the dvd player . You wrote on the end of this post that further parts of this will have more of an inpact on system performance if this problem is rectified or you have anyway you know i could rectify this myself to get the required performance then please tell me and i woud do it as i prefare o x to windows but don’t have the money for a mac just yet.

Thanks Andy

lol

Much love anyway.

Not a problem at all, I am happy to do this for those enthusiasts like myself that would like to experience the beautiful integration of Mac and BSD/Mach, supported on our Intel-based hardware.

Regarding the detection of the LCD display - the laptop uses an older card called the nVidia GeForce 440 GO. It’s capabilities aren’t very attractive and it is probably the weakest link in our laptops.

There are sorted reports with people claiming they got theirs to work using the MacVidia 1.8 drivers, while most say they cannot and have to default strictly to the default display resolution. QE/CI are disabled by default in this mode and the resolution won’t scale accordingly.

DiegoMax himself stated on IRC that the support for the card with their driver was spotty at best and seemed to indicate that the hardware wasn’t vital due to it’s age. The graphics card had so many variants under the apparent umbrella name of nVidia GeForce 440 GO, that it was entirely a 50/50 gamble that we’d ever get that card up that was although recognized, but not initialized.

I’ve tried 3 manual installations and two automatic installations of the MacVidia drivers to no avail with a deep editing of the kexts providing the kickstart to the hardware.

Just as a notice, the driver architects are supposedly planning to remove support for this type of archaic card altogether, based on testimony from DiegoMax via IRC, in a potential new release of the MacVidia series of drivers that np_ is working on. There are confirmed reports of individuals being able to at least get better functionality from the card using Natit/Titan ‘injectors’ (more of a hardware assistant than a driver), but I’ve not yet personally had success with them.

If I do find a solution, rest assured, I will post an article about it straightaway. It is one of the topics on my list to publish on regarding this OS on this specific hardware.

Regarding the update to 10.4.9 - it can be done, but you should not do it through the OSX Software Updating service. You need to use a standalone installer package and type some commands in Terminal. I will be posting another article on this here in the coming future, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I do suggest visiting the MacSpeak IRC network and asking some questions about this on #OSx86 and the Insanely Mac forums to try some of the methods others have used. Perhaps you will have better luck than the rest of us.