I have decided to try out Linux Mint for the very first time. I am going to go through the steps involved to install Linux Mint from USB. Universal Serial Bus is normally faster than Digital Versatile Disc. You will need a spare computer and USB flash drive.
You then need to download Linux Mint from the link above. Currently there are four different variations of Linux Mint 18.3 that you can install.
* Cinnamon
* KDE
* Mate
* Xfce
There are x86 32 bit and x64 64 bit versions available for download. I choose to install Linux Mint 18.3 Xfce because I have used this window manager before and it is quite lightweight compared the other three window managers. Once you download the .iso file then you will need to burn it to either DVD or flash it to USB.
You will need a program like Rufus or Etcher. I was not able to flash successfully a Linux Mint 18.3 USB drive with Rufus so I used Etcher instead. Etcher is recommended on Linux Mint’s website.
Hackintosh Mac OSX Snow Leopard on Dell Inspiron 530s fully working Specs: Intel® Pentium® dual-core processor E5200 (2MB L2, 2.5GHz, 800 FSB) 16X DVD+/-RW D. Hello, my Dell is: Dell Inspiron 5558. Intel core i5-5200U. Intel HD 5500 + Nvidia 920m. Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160. Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller. Hard disc 1T I tried to install the Mac OS X Sierra with this guide here but i have a problem with the clover and with the Bootpack. Please, help me.
Now once your flash drive is ready, then you can attach it to a USB port on your computer. Any laptop or desktop computer will work. I would recommend a computer with at least 1 gigahertz processor, 1 megabytes Random Access Memory, and 20 gigabytes hard drive space.
Also, recommended is to connect your computer to the Internet before starting the install. You do NOT have to have Internet connection to complete the install. Another tip is that you can test Linux Mint 18.3 on your hardware before installing.
The USB flash drive boots a demonstration version of Linux Mint 18.3. On my Dell Inspiron 530 I had to make sure that the Basic Input Output System detected the USB flash drive. Also, I made certain that I enabled “Removable Media” as a boot choice.
On Dell computers you can press F2 to enter the BIOS and F12 to enter a boot menu. This boot menu allows you to choose what device to boot from. Your computer might detect this USB flash drive as a USB HDD.
This is normal and you would select this device to boot from. Once you boot off the Linux Mint 18.3 media, you will be logged into a desktop. You can test Linux Mint 18.3.
Double click on an installation icon on the desktop to begin the installation. You can accept the default settings, which is what I recommend if you are new to Linux. You will be asked to choose your language, keyboard type and city location.
Then you will be asked to choose your type of installation. I recommend that you choose the top one which is choosen by default. All of the partition settings will be chosen for you.
You do NOT need to know how to partition using Gparted in order to get Linux Mint installed and working. However, you can choose to encrypt your hard drive, configure Logical Volume Management and even choose a custom install. I have been using different Linux distributions for over 15 years now and I rarely fuck with partitioning, logical volume management, encryption, and custom installs.
Finally, you will be asked to enter in a name, username, password, verify password, and computer name. You do NOT need to enter in a name. You must enter in a username, password, and computer name I think.
Installing Hackintosh On Dell Inspiron 530 Specs
You can change your password later or even blank it. You can also choose to have Linux Mint 18.3 automatically login each time. You can change this later.
Linux Mint 18.3 will download some updates from the Internet if you connected your computer to an Interne connection. If not it will begin to load files from the media you created. It took around ten minutes to install Linux Mint rrom USB on my dual core Dell 530 Inspiron with 4 gigabytes of memory.
Once Linux Mint 18.3 installation is finished it will warn you to remove your installation media. Remove your installation media ie. DVD, USB flash drive, etc. and then hit enter. Now Linux Mint 18.3 will boot for the first time.
Installing Hackintosh On Dell Inspiron 530
Depending on how you decided to enter your desktop, you will either see your desktop or have to login with your username and password. Now that you are finished with your installation you deserve to enjoy a mint, a Linux Mint.
This is an update to my previous guide. I’ve since changed platform for my site — and even changed computers — but there is enough interest in this guide to warrant a re-write, so here we go.
I’m going to be walking you through installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4 on your Dell Inspiron 1525. The configuration of your Inspiron 1525 might differ from mine, but generally most of the hardware will be the same.
My hardware is as follows:
- Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo processor (2ghz, 2mb cache)
- 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM (667MHz, 10MB dedicated to onboard graphics)
- Intel Crestline Graphics (This is the GMA X3100, just like the Macbook)
- Sigmatel 9205 HD Audio
- Dell Wireless (Broadcom BCM4315, essentially an Airport card)
Prerequisites
- Dell Inspiron 1525
This might apply to other Dell models, but I’m not here to support you if it doesn’t work. If you want help, check out the InsanelyMac forums, or the OSx86 Wiki
- OS X Snow Leopard retail DVD
I’m not going to support installing with hacked/prepackaged non-Apple DVDs. There might be working methods for those, but it won’t be covered here.
- Boot-132 CD (from here)
- A couple of hours of free time
A good install will take less than an hour, but you’ll most likely want to tweak things after your install is done.
- Some patience
Let’s begin
- Backup your files
- Burn your Boot-132 CD
- Setup BIOS settings
- Boot the installer
- Install
- Post-installation configuration and finishing
Backup your files
This is the most important step I guess. This install will wipe everything from the internal hard disk drive inside your Inspiron, so make sure you’ve backed up anything that you want to keep before continuing.
Most Inspirons come with a hard disk smaller than 500GB, so you could easily pick up a 500GB or greater sized external hard disk, and backup all of your stuff to that.
Burn your Boot-132 CD
The Boot-132 CD is the best way to boot a retail Snow Leopard DVD on your Dell, it uses the Chameleon boot loader, a DSDT.aml and Kexts for the Inspiron 1525 hardware to allow the Snow Leopard DVD to boot.
I’m not going to walk you through burning an ISO to CD, but you can use Imgburn, Nero, Disk Utility, or any other ISO burning software.
I’ve done this using a CD-RW, CD-R and even a DVD, so you should have no problem finding some compatible disc to burn the ISO to.
Download the Boot-132 from macyourpc.com here - http://www.macyourpc.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/BootSLv3wifi.iso
Setup BIOS settings
For whatever reason, you may have your BIOS configured in a weird way. If you’ve currently got Windows XP on your Inspiron 1525, you might not have AHCI enabled for your hard disk drive.
Boot your Inspiron while pressing the F2 key repeatedly, until you are greeted by the BIOS menu.
First you will want to reset the BIOS to default settings, to do this, go to:
Maintenance
- Load Defaults = Continue
Below is a list of the important settings in the BIOS, which have worked for me, these should be the default settings:
Onboard Devices
- External USB ports = Enabled
- Media Card and 1394 = Enabled
- SATA Operation = AHCI
- Module Bay Device = Enabled
- Flash Cache Module = Enabled
Performance
- Multi Core Support = Enabled
- Dynamic Acceleration = Enabled
- SpeedStep Enable = Enabled
Power Management
- USB Wake Support = Off
POST Behaviour
- USB Emulation = Enabled
When you’re finished here, press Esc to exit and choose Save/Exit.
Boot the installer
After this is all setup, you can go on and insert the Boot-132 CD that you burned earlier, restart your Inspiron and press F12 for the boot menu, then select your DVD drive to boot. After a moment you should see the Chameleon menu.
Wait until the DVD drive stops spinning to make sure Chameleon has fully loaded, then eject your Boot-132 CD and insert the Snow Leopard DVD.
Press F5 and wait for Chameleon to finish refreshing the available bootable devices.
Select “Mac OS X Install DVD” and then type the following (this part is actully optional, and depends entirely on your hardware setup. If you’ve got the same CPU/RAM as me, this will work for you):
You will see the text appear in the bottom-left corner of the screen. Once you’ve typed it, just press Enter, and wait for the DVD to finish loading.
These are boot flags, they tell Chameleon how to boot the Installer. You will also need to use these later, so I’ll explain what they mean (chameleon docs):
You will see lots of text scroll past on the screen, don’t panic if it pauses for a little while.
After a minute or two the Snow Leopard installer should have booted.
Install
The installer is pretty straightforward, so I don’t think I need to go into too much detail here. The important things are the partitioning of your hard disk, and for speed of the install, removing packages.
Partitioning
On the Menu Bar at the top of the screen click Utilities and then select Disk Utility.
In the window that opens, select your hard disk drive from the left pane, then on the right side click the Partition tab.
IMPORTANT — MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SELECTED THE CORRECT HARD DRIVE, THE NEXT STEPS WILL ERASE ALL DATA FROM THE HARD DRIVE
Under Volume Scheme: select ‘1 Partition’, or as many as you would like to have. For each partition, you will need to fill in the Name: field on the right, and select a format (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is what you will need for the partition you’re installing to)
Click the Options… button at the bottom of the window, and make sure GUID Partition Table is selected.
When you’re done here, press the Apply button to begin partitioning. You can now close the Disk Utility when you are finished.
Continuing with the installer
After you’ve finished partitioning, you will be taken back to the Mac OS X Installer. Click Continue, and then agree to the software license agreement.
On the next screen, select the hard drive you just formatted and click Customize. You can untick all of these extra options, unless you require extra languages/fonts/printer drivers. Not installing these will save loads of time.
When you’re done deselecting packages you can press Install.
At this point all you can do is wait, so I suggest getting a coffee or something.
When the install has finished (and you’ve hopefully got a nice Install Succeeded message on your screen), turn off the Inspiron and put the Boot-132 CD back in to continue with the final part of the install.
Post-installation configuration and finishing
When you boot the Boot-132 CD this time, you should see a nice Apple icon, with the name of your install hard drive below it.
Select this boot drive, and type in the following commands to boot:
You’ll get a screen filled with lines of text for a moment, but eventually you should be greeted by the post-installation screen, where you can set up your profile.
On the desktop you should see a SL boot132 CD icon, double click this to view the contents of the CD, and then navigate to the Post-Install directory. In Post-Install you should find a Read Me First file — this will explain what everything is in this directory.
Installing Chameleon
First thing we need to do is install the Chameleon 2 RC3 boot loader, so you can boot the Inspiron without using the Boot-132 CD. Double click the Chameleon 2 RC3 installer, and enter your password when prompted.
Next, you need to copy the contents of the Extra directory from Post-Install to the Extra directory on the root of your hard disk. To get to your hard disk, you can either select it on the left side of the Finder window that you have open, or in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen click Go and then Computer.
Just paste the files from Post-Install/Extra into the Extra on your hard disk drive, and select to Authenticate when it asks you to.
Installing additional kexts
The majority of your kexts (hardware drivers) are in /Extra/KextStore, these are for fixes specific to the Inspiron 1525 hardware. For more general kexts, these will need to be installed to /System/Library/Extensions. On the Boot-132 CD, in Post-Install/Applications you will find two applications:
- Kext Helper - use this for installing kexts to /System/Library/Extensions
- MKextTool - use this for rebuilding the Extensions.mkext if you change the kexts in /Extra/KextStore
You’re going to need to open Kext Helper now to install the remaining kexts from Post-Install/Local Extensions.
Extra configuration
If you’ve got the Dell Wireless (Broadcom-based) Wi-Fi card in your Inspiron, you should find that wireless works already, so you can connect to your wireless network now or plug in an ethernet cable and use the wired network.
If the screen colours look a bit weird (mine looked very purple), open System Preferences and click Displays, click the Color tab and then select one of the display profiles from the list. I find that the Generic RGB Profile looks the best.
To make sound work, you will need to open System Preferences again and go to Sound, select the Output tab and then from the device list select Speaker (Fixed).
Update: You can see part 2 of the guide here
I no longer own the Dell Inspiron 1525, and so I’m no longer supporting this guide.
This post was written way back in 2010. There's a chance that it's no-longer correct, or it has been superseded by a newer post. I commend you for making it this far through my archive!
Take a look in the Archive to see if I've written a newer post on the subject.