I forget exactly which one it was, ideneb 1.4 or Kalyway 10.5.2 but it boots up the installer ready to go, according to the system profiler it does not see my sound card, my wifi and the installer does not see my hard drive.

Sound and wifi may be fixed later on, not sure but it is vital that it sees a hard disk for obvious reasons. (magnetic data cannot be stored upon a magnetic platter if the software does not recognize the magnetic storage device in which data should go)

so does anyone know which distro for acer extensa 4420?
video is ATI radeon x1200 series]
realtek onboard sound
AMD RS690/RS690M chipset
AMD Athlon x2 1.9Ghz
4G Ram
Hitachi 160GB hard drive
broadcom wifi

did I miss anything? Let me know

Hiya there, can you please post your audio chipset and wifi chipset model?

I have the exact same computer as the original poster, and I see that someone took interest, but he never came back around for the help, I guess.

Anyway, I would also like to know, which distro for the aforementioned computer? As requested, the sound chip is ... Well, it lists in Windows as "Realtek High Definition Audi", and I can't really find a chip name or anything.. If an ID number would help, it is HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0268&SUBSYS_10250123& REV_1000
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0268&SUBSYS_10250123

per Hardware Manager.

Now, for the Wifi.. Weird one, because I know it is a Broadcom chip in there, the original poster is correct. However, due to the wonkiness of switching to Windows XP (The laptop originally comes Vista), the computer uses drivers for a Dell 1395 Mini W-Lan card, so anything compatible with that on that end, should suffice. (That is, so long as Mac has the ability to ignore the driver possibly saying "Woah, this isn't the right thing.." because it might complain of that, but it has to be forced; it works.)

If there is anything else I can do to help complete the OP's install, Glad to help. I'd really like to get it working right myself. From what I can tell, a poster My Acer Extensa Laptop Install - InsanelyMac Forum (Apologies if linking to another forum is against the rules, its for knowledge purposes!) got a semi-successful install on the same computer we have, with the exception of his Gigabit WLAN and his sound card, which I hope we can smooth out here

Well you really need to post the Realtek chipset, heres the list for realtek with osx support...

now for wifi read this:

Onboard WiFi:

unless you have a Dell truemobile wireless card (Broadcom chipset) the intel ones does not have working kext ATM, but there is an effort to develop one here: Intel Wireless driver - InsanelyMac Forum
Also you can use an USB WiFi adapter, check the WiKi, I have a Zydas and Ralink adapters that work with Tiger and Leopard or you can buy the Dell Truemobile 1390 card off ebay for $15 shipped [Jake123 tip]
I bought a Dell Wireless TrueMobile 1505 Draft N mini PCI-E card that works out of the box as an Airport.


Bluetooth and Webcam are working out of the box

macgirl