in terminal, type “sudo chown root:wheel /” and restart

It seems the owner of the root somehow gets messed up, probably after Chameleon install (just a wild guess).
Thanks to bertmannaustria @ InsanelyMac! (Original thread)

Update: For anyone who is having problems, I have a new kext package. This is a zip of my /Extra folder that I’m using right now on my Inspiron 640m. 640mExtra-Updated Also my system is 32-bit only, so I can’t guarantee this will work in 64-bit mode.

After much trial and error, I finally found the proper procedure for installing Snow Leopard onto my Inspiron 640m. For reasons that I cannot fathom, I was unable to perform the chameleon cdboot/swap to boot from the retail Snow DVD. It might be my DVD drive, or some other cause, but I didn’t bother finding out; I just took the hard drive out of my laptop and connected it via USB to my iMac.

Here’s the procedure that I followed yesterday to install Mac OS X 10.6.0 on my Inspiron 640m. It’s tested, working and stable, everything is great except that this laptop does NOT wake from sleep. It goes to sleep just fine, just won’t wake. Here goes:

1. Remove hard drive from the Inspiron. Connect it using a hard drive dock or USB to SATA enclosure/adapter.
2. Put Mac OS X Snow Leopard DVD into existing Mac (Hackintosh or real mac, doesn’t matter).
3. Using Disk Utility, partition your Inspiron’s drive as you like, using a GUID Parition table.
4. With your Snow Leopard DVD mounted, in Finder, choose Go to folder. In the box that comes up type “/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages”.
5. This will open a folder with a lot of install pkgs. Find OSInstall.mpkg and double-click it.
6. Follow the steps to install Snow Leopard, making sure to pick the proper drive for installation.
7. Once the installation is done, eject your USB drive and put the hard drive back in your Inspiron.
8. Download the Inspiron6400.iso and burn it to a CD.
9. Power up your Inspiron and boot from the CD
10. From the Chameleon menu, use the arrow keys to select the hard drive.
11. Type the following boot arguments: -v cpus=1
12. Your Inspiron should boot into Snow Leopard. Congratulations!
13. Download my 2 Inspiron kext packages: Inspiron640mExtensions Inspiron640mExtra
14. In the Inspiron640mExtensions, you will find kext helper. Run it, and drag AppleBCM440XEthernet.kext, VoodooBattery.kext and VoodooHDA.kext onto it, enter password and install.
15. You will also find the Chameleon RC4 installer. Run it, but DON’T reboot at the end.
16. Extract the Inspiron640mExtra.zip. Copy the contents of the extracted Extra folder to /Extra.
17. Remove the Inspiron6400 CD and reboot. hopefully your laptop should boot fine from the hard drive.

Just a few notes:

• I cannot get the laptop to wake from sleep. As such, the SleepEnabler.kext is not included. I also included the InsomniaX app which you might choose to install to prevent your laptop from sleeping.
• This method seems to be update-safe. I just updated to 10.6.2 using Software Update and all is ok.
• When the clamshell display is closed, the Dell BIOS or something blanks the screen. Mac OS cannot re-enable the screen and you’ll be stuck staring at a black LCD. To circumvent this, set one of your screen corners in Expose prefs to put the display to sleep. If ever you find yourself with a black screen, move the cursor to that corner to force the display to sleep, then wake it up again.
• The Intel PRO 3945 ABG wireless card that came with my Inspiron (and all Inspirons that are branded “Centrino”) does NOT work with Mac OS X. I swapped mine for a Dell 1505 Draft-N card (cheap on eBay) that works perfectly out-of-the-box.
• The Broadcom 440x ethernet card seems to work fine, I tested it briefly with some light web browsing. However, the original thread says that the driver occasionally drops connections, so YMMV.
• Finally, a quick thanks to all the OSX86 devs. None of the kexts found here are made by me, all credit goes to the original authors. I found all the necessary info over at the InsanelyMac forum.

Update 3: I recently tried to format and re-install snow leopard, and now I can’t get the laptop to boot from the Chameleon cdboot. I’m working on it and will post when I find a solution.

Update 2: The Broadcom 440x kext found here makes the card detected in Snow Leopard, however, it works intermittently. Most of the time you will fail to get an IP.

Update: You can run updates from Software Update, however remember to DELETE SleepEnabler.kext before upgrading to 10.6.2 (check /Extra and /System/Library/Extensions). Otherwise you’ll get a nice kernel panic.

Just installed Mac OS X 10.6 on my trusty old Dell Inspiron 640m.

Intel Core Duo T2050 processor @ 1.60GHz
2GB DDR2 SDRAM
Intel GMA950 integrated graphics (1440×900)
Intel 3945ABG Dell TrueMobile 1505 802.11n Mini PCIE WLAN card

It was quite easy; actually easier than Leopard.

I basically followed the steps found here:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=182227

(ISO mirrored here: Inspiron6400.iso)

Make sure to always boot with cpus=1

Then, I installed a few additional kexts for the onboard Broadcom 440x (AppleBCM440XEthernet.kext), battery status display VoodooBattery.kext, and HD Audio VoodooHDA.kext.

To fix the cpus=1 problem, install VoodooTSCSync.kext

I have only one problem with this setup, the laptop does NOT wake from sleep.

Fix to avoid needing cpus=1 at boot for Core Duo machines (typically Dell)

1. Obtain the excellent iATKOS 7 DVD ISO. Burn to disc.
2. Boot from the install DVD. (You may have to use an external VGA monitor to prevent the “Blue screen”) Use the Disk Utility to format the drive as a single large HFSJ partition, using the MBR partition table. (I use a partition label without spaces because of some past experiences.)
3. Install; select appropriate drivers. Don’t reboot at the end of the installation.
   • None of the audio or video drivers work, so uncheck all of them.
   • VoodooPS2 with trackpad plugin works great
   • Intel ICH IDE driver?
   • Cardbus driver causes kernel panic, so UNCHECK that one
   • Voodoo kernel 9.5.0 is necessary, as this machine only has SSE2 (Intel Pentium M 715)
   • I selected the Broadcom wifi driver for a Dell 1370 MiniPCI card; my laptop originally came with an Atheros AR5005G. (The AR5005G works with Leopard, however last I checked it needed to use the old kext from Tiger, which breaks WPA support*)
4. Now comes the fun part. Download the GMA900 Leopard kext package. (source) Extract it and put the kexts on a FAT32 or FAT formatted USB drive.
5. Plug the USB drive into the Aspire. Reboot; at the chameleon boot menu press any key to bring up the boot flags prompt (at the bottom of the screen), then type -x -s -v to enter single-user, safe mode with verbose boot.
6. You will see a lot of scrolling text. Finally it will drop to a shell prompt with instructions about fsck and mount -uw. Do as it says.
7. cd to /Volumes. mkdir usbdrive.
8. mount -t msdos /dev/diskXsY /Volumes/usbdrive, where X and Y are the disk and partition numbers of your usb drive, respectively. This may require some trial-and-error, but getting the wrong one won’t harm your system in any way, it will just display an error message.
9. Once you have the drive mounted, cp -Rv /Volumes/usbdrive/*.kext /System/Library/Extensions. Then cd to /System/Library/Extensions and make sure the two new kexts are owned by root:wheel.
10. reboot. The system should now boot with QE+CI!
11. Once you’re at the desktop, you should now install the AC97Audio.pkg and (optionally) the fixed version of VoodooPS2Controller.kext that gives you back the ~ key. I also recommend the VoodooPower.kext from superhai to allow SpeedStep to work.

And that should be it! Note that I am writing this guide from memory, so I may have missed a few steps. DO NOT upgrade to Safari 4 on this machine, it causes kernel panics. Also, I have NOT tested the 10.5.8 update, so YMMV there.

*Atheros 5005G info: Install this IO80211Family.kext. Then, the Atheros card should be detected as AirPort. Unfortunately, attempting to connect to WPA-protected networks will result in a “connection failed” message. To get around this, you can either click the “assist me” button in network preferences and follow the prompts, or use the following command in Terminal (source):

sudo networksetup -setairportnetwork "your wifi name" "password"

Patched files necessary:

Graphics (DSDT fix): ITX-220_DSDT_GMA950

Audio (VoodooHDA Volume fix): VoodooMOD