Update: For temperature/fan issues, this post over at HP Mini forums looks promising.

Yes, it’s another hackintosh post, but what can I say, it’s this stuff that’s hardest to remember and useful to lots of people. Emma, if you’re reading this, this was done for you. 🙂 Let me just say that this is purely for educational purposes, and yes, I do own a real mac and both Leopard and Snow Leopard.

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"

2 Responses to “Mac OS X 10.5.7 on Acer Aspire 3620”

1. stephenJ says:

   2010-06-08 at 10:11

   Firefox 3.5.9 Mac OS X 10.4
   Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100315 Firefox/3.5.9

   Thanks – have the same Acer laptop. Tried to get the wireless working and did succeed following this great post. Was a ‘dyed in the wool’ Windows user ’till discovered OSX. Am saving up to get a real MAc. Stephen

   Reply
2. orcia says:

   2010-12-07 at 06:51

   Firefox 2.0.0.3 Windows XP
   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

   bonjour matthieu merci car je vien davoir le meme portable je vais donc installler ce soir bonne journee

   Reply