iPC post installation

January 03, 2009

Once you’ve installed the iPC osx86 distribution, there are a number of system dependent things you will want to do. Here is what I do on my main system

System Specs

Asus P5B Deluxe, 4GB Ram, SATA Disks using Intel AHCI (ICH8), Marvell 88E8056 Gibabyte Ethernet, USB external sound card

Networking

Networking doesn’t work after install because distribution is missing kext for the 88E8056. Best thing to do is to add a kext for it using UInstaller. Look for kexts on my spares partition

  • AppleYukon2.kext

Video, Graphics Strings and EFI

We didn’t do anything to help our video work in our installation. It turns out that instead of installing kexts to get video to work you can use the EFI boot loader instead. What you have to do is put some settings into your bios using the bootloader. In theory this is pretty complex as you have to write settings in XML then convert them into a hex format, then embed … (well its complex). However UInstaller can do all this for you so

  • check Apply Ethernet EFI String
  • check Apply EFI String for graphics card
    • select NVidia GeForce 7600 GT 256MB

Apply Changes

I wouldn’t apply anything else apart from these two changes. Make sure you install them to the correct volume and don’t apply anything else. Now you should be ready to boot the new installation