Hi folks, just registered.

A few weeks ago (sometime in January) I successfully got Tiger installed on VMWare and although *really* slow (on a Phenom 9850BE) it was interesting to have a look at and seemed to work mostly. There was apple.com, on safari, on a mac, in a window. Nice I thought, but still slow.
Last night I installed it natively and came across some annoying (but not entirely surprising) things; no sound, no network .... etc.... Note to self, I need to read more about kexts...

Anyway, long story short, I want Leopard (who doesn't, right?). Snow Leopard would be great but alas not yet.

Can anyone suggest a distro that is likely to work with my hardware (listed below)?????

I'm not asking for a miracle-pop-in-dvd-and-watch-work just some pointers as to what is a reasonable educated guess based on what others have achieved (or even just attempted).

I'm a quick study and have been tinkering with Windows since 1995 both professionally and for fun, now it's grown up somewhat. I would never have touched a Mac before OS X was released (aside from experimenting with shapeshifter on an Amiga 1200 several years ago!).

Any help or suggestions would be gladly appreciated and assuming I get a stable working system I'll be able (and happy) to pass on my new found expertise to others.

Current system:

Gigabyte MA-790X-DS4 - Award BIOS updated to rev F6 in order to support Phenom II - AMD 790X Chipset, ATI SB600, ITE IT8718 LPCIO
AMD Phenom II 940 (Quad) @3.0Ghz - SSE 1,2,3 & SSE4A
8Gb OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2 800Mhz (4x2Gb @ 4-4-4-15) - unganged

SATA RAID 0 - 2x WD 320Gb - Stripe 0 - Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1
SATA JBOD - 2x WD 500Gb - Storage only
An old Promise TX133 Ultra PCI running 1x IDE 160Gb & 1x IDE 120Gb - Storage

IDE Maxtor 80Gb set as slave - reserved for Mac OS experiments
IDE HL-DT-ST DVD RAM set as master

currently grabbing iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Universal PPF5 (Final).iso

fingers crossed... last two I tried failed to boot even in single user mode, text only

Ok after several reboots, changing bios settings (disable legacy usb, disable SATA controller) I still get

"Still waiting for root device"

Have done a fair bit of research into this but still no joy.
I have made the IDE HD Master and DVDRW Slave, still the same.

Can't boot this in VMWare either, maybe it's the iso/disc?

You can try with lawless for phenom.

Thanks, already on the case.

I tried unsuccessfully with iPC, tried iatkos last night, left it running while I went to work, came home and it was cycling reboot.

Downloaded Lawless last night before bed, tried literally 10 minutes ago, install went ok, now I get the dreaded "Still waiting for root device" but at least this is after install and not before.

I consider this progress.

This is LawlessPPC-Leo-10.5.4-Phenom&AMD.iso

According to what I've read, this release (and the last two I tried) allegedly fix this problem (assuming that it is the "partition set as active" issue).

Any ideas? Not much hair left to pull out and I'm seriously considering shelving the Mac OS x86 idea for a couple of months as it's taking up too much of my time (and my wife is complaining too!). Mind you having said that, if I get this working I'll try on my HP dv2000 which will make her happy cos she always wanted a Mac

EDIT: The iAtkos I tried last night was 4a, I notice there are some more recent releases, maybe I will try them (I notice you are using v5i icchansan)

Hmmm Lawless locks up after checking dvd and selecting customisations. Gonna have another play around......

Here's a thought.. Can I use kexts from one release on another? and if so do I have do add them to the install dvd or can I pop in another disc to load them from during install?

For example, iAtkos got further than iPC but iPC has more driver kexts suitable for my hardware......

Almost forgot, is there an iAtkos v5A? I'm assuming the i represents intel only and a represents amd?

Yeh Ithink some kext should work, you can also try to get it using osx86 tools or just google them, good luck

Got it working with LawlessPPC (thanks for that icchansan).

Disk access seems abysmally slow although that could be the HD I suppose, but I have used this one on my old comp and when ntfs formatted it performs reasonably

Is there a way to increase disk IO performance?

Timemachine buggered my install, I'm back waiting for root device grrrr

download menumeters (Google) to check how the system MenuMeters 1.3 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

Also i'd never use Time Machine, not a fan