WinMacTu, the Windows, OSX, Ubuntu laptop...

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the OSx86 project. I decided that it would be a good time to try to install it on my XPS 1530. I also noticed that the new Ubuntu was out and thought I would install all three. (Installation and bootloader info to follow)

This was a week ago, and one week later, I am happily running my triple dual boot. It was a good idea, but alas the MacOS Partition has been removed. Before I get in to why let me give some information about the setup and the configuration.

Computer:
XPS 1530
Core 2 Duo T5550 (1.83 Ghz processor)
1440x900 LCD
2GB Memory
120 GB 5400 SATA HDD
128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
Dell 1490 Wireless Card
Dell bluetooth card (Taken out of my Inspison E1505)
Sigmatel STAC9228 sound card

The first thing I did was partition the drive in a way I thought would be best. What I did was a 15 GB partition for each OS and then the rest as a shared storage drive. Format the shared drive to FAT to be sure you can read and write to it easily from each of the operating systems. There are ways to read all the others, but FAT makes it really easy, because there is no extra configuring to do.

After setup I was indeed successful in installing all 3, and configuring the Vista bootloader to give me the choice of what to boot to, it all worked great. Everything worked great in Vista, and Ubuntu. A lot of things worked just fine under Mac but I had some major problems thatall the forum crawling and kextloading I did I could not fix. The following were problematic in OSX:

1) Sound. Tried many different things, downloading pre patched kexts, using AppleHDA with a codec dump, the Dell Leopard OS X post-installer. Nothing worked at all.

2) Ethernet -- I believe that this did not work, but admittedly, I never tried it, because the wireless worked flawlessely.

3) Mouse. It worked great until I tried to install the patch to allow 2 finger scrolling. It enabled a version of scrolling, (one finger, hold at edge for a second then it would scroll) but it RUINED the mouse Acceleration. (I was able to speedd it up again, but the acceleration was just too messed up)

The mouse is really what did it. Before that not having sound was annoying but not mission critical. I do plan on reinstalling OSX to a bootable USB external, or at least trying to, we shall see if that works.

Check back later for my install guide.