Intel video on a Dell 1510 (or anything else with X3100)

Wow - what a pain. Apparently the drivers for X3100 that ship with anything after 10.5.2 do not work with QE/CI, so you need to load up the 10.5.2 version and erase the Integrated Framebuffer kernel extension.

However once you have it loaded up all is good. I discovered this the hard way - I ordered a Vostro 1510 for a friend off of ebay and when I went to load it up I discovered that it did not have nvidia video. oops.

Also I discovered that the Dell 139x wireless works just fine and I didn't need to order that Atheros card from Hong Kong. again... oops. But the Atheros card is much faster, so I'll have a use for it. I am sure I will post it here.

Speaking of Dell wireless, the drivers on the iPC disc work much better then the ones on the iDeneb disc, although the iDeneb distribution in general work better for the 1510.

Dell 600m (D600)

I loaded iPC 10.5.6 onto an Inspiron 600m last night just to see if it could be done. It worked decently, but there are no video drivers available for the ATI Mobile Radeon that it uses and it seems to lock up whenever it wants to take a bit of a nap. It's enough for my wife to use for basic word processing until I can get her a new (semi-)permanent machine - she unfortunately needs to get the resume back into shape; one of the recent victims of this economy.

I woudl consider loading up my 700m, but I think it would have the same video problem. I'll wait for the minis to show up.

Why here? Why now?

Why am I starting this blog? Simple - I felt like it. I have a bunch of notebooks and netbooks. Some came with Windows and some with Linux, but none came with MacOS. I consider this a big deficiency.

Let's step back a bit... I love Linux - more than you could imagine. However there are a lot of things missing from Linux that make day-to-day life a pain in the butt.

I also love MacOS. I have used it since beta testing days when programs were written on a Lisa and ported over and the version numbers were less than 1. My first real macintosh was a 128k. I sent out the motherboard to have a third party 512k upgrade done. Then I had a Mac Plus followed by an SE. I had the very first Newton, a MacBook 140, into which I put a 170 motherboard... you get the idea. I remember system 6 then finally system 7 which could run more than one program. I remember the PowerPC architecture coming out and playing with the NeXT cubes.

Then comes OS/X. Unix on a Mac! NetBSD to be specific, but with an interface that not only turn Unix into a usable client frontend, but a Mac nonetheless - I love it! But alas, it is restricted to Apple hardware only; Silly Apple :) Did they really think it would stay restricted?

That brings us up to where we are now. Me with all of these notebooks and versions of OS/X that can be loaded onto them. If you are here to learn how to do this, I am sorry, but this is not meant to be a tutorial. This is just to compare and contrast how well (or not) OS/X runs on various note- and net-books, and hopefully along the way someone will convince Apple that we want this and Apple will decide to allow this without all the hassles.

So what do we use for comparison?

I happen to be writing this on a Dell Vostro 1510. It has a Core Duo T9500, 4 GB RAM, a 320GB 7200 RPM drive and an Nvidia graphics card.

XBench (a free benchmarking tool) shows:
Results 103.21
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacPro3,1
Drive Type ST9320421AS
CPU Test 84.93
GCD Loop 113.41 5.98 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 65.72 1.56 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 55.35 1.83 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 200.23 34.87 Mops/sec
Thread Test 303.89
Computation 473.17 9.59 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 223.82 9.63 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 171.57
System 193.42
Allocate 361.15 1.33 Malloc/sec
Fill 149.68 7277.78 MB/sec
Copy 165.01 3408.20 MB/sec
Stream 154.16
Copy 146.49 3025.72 MB/sec
Scale 152.05 3141.21 MB/sec
Add 159.76 3403.32 MB/sec
Triad 159.11 3403.78 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 150.69
Line 126.61 8.43 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 213.94 63.87 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 147.48 12.02 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 147.68 3.72 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 141.71 8.86 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 82.02
Spinning Squares 82.02 104.05 frames/sec
User Interface Test 206.33
Elements 206.33 946.93 refresh/sec
Disk Test 43.00
Sequential 117.33
Uncached Write 123.24 75.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 131.40 74.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 84.48 24.72 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 153.13 76.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.32
Uncached Write 7.99 0.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 137.08 43.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.08 0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 117.32 21.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]

So there we go - a basis for comparison. While I am waiting for some of the netbooks to show up, I might load up some older notebooks just for fun and practice.