The best part of it all is to see what a bunch of enthusiasts and programmers can do in their spare time. I bet Apple would love to see guys like Mifki or Semthex working for them. These people have managed to incorporate all their efforts and software bits into one lovely DVD installer. Whether your hardware is there, you just go on and pick up the right parts. For instance, do you own a 950 integrated VGA on your mobo? Just press the tick box! The rest is just matter of time. To be honest, this is not as easy as it sounds. It will take two or more installations in order to make it work perfectly. The goal is to make it happen as if you had a real gear in front of you… but you don’t. Here’s what we have picked up:

1. Jas 10.4.8 combo update (you need this in order to be up-to-date)
2. Intel SSE3 Semthex kernel (the Mifki worked fine too)
3. 10.4.8 GMA950 support

That was about it. We checked all we needed and we started the Disk utility from the Utilities menu on the top. After formatting the drive with the Apple Journaled System, we left the machine check the DVD media and install the software. It took about 12 mins. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the ‘Box’:

Yes. That’s our idea of a perfect lab machine! Who needs screws? Who needs floppy? Who needs a chassis? Just plain power over the table!

From left to right: The 6600 Intel CPU with the Intel official blower (you’ll get to hate the plastic screw mounting system by the way – they break awfully easy!) Down, beside the LPT port the USB generic sound device – just 13 euros off the shelf at Stournari St. Athens. Rocks! Up above the CPU: 2GB of OCZ mem. The Foxconn mobo is laying on a plastic X800 GT pack-case and right beside it you can see the IBM Deskstar (30GB) laying over the Toshiba DVD ROM (right below the PC World Secrets leaflet – makes perfect isolation between the electronic parts of the HDD and the top of the DVD ROM metallic case).