MinnowBook 3400c

[raoulduke]

I mean... part of the appeal is that nobody seems to have done it.  But you're right; this project is irrational as an attempt to build a laptop - and that was sort of some of the initial appeal.

But now I am genuinely curious about compatibility.  As far as I can tell the Board only has HDMI output - for audio and video.  I've never tried to run OS X on a machine that has no actual graphics card.  I'm not sure how GraphicsEnabler.kext will handle that.  I don't think I've ever used HDMI, actually.

 

[tanuki65]

I have — ASUS P8Z68-M pro & integrated Intel graphics.

 

[djblastyfone]

I've actually thought about how someone might go about this after seeing some seriously impressive iMac G4 hackintoshes (logic board swapped with Intel NUC, custom LVDS to DVI adapter for the display) on various forums. Seems to me the best way of going about this would be using an NUC or similar, since the hardware is almost fully supported by OS X out of the box. You can even get one with a Thunderbolt port!

The main challenges I see with the project are:

1. Figure out a way to run the thing off battery. The PowerBook battery could be opened and hollowed out, allowing for a battery setup that would work for powering the NUC. Battery life life may not be stellar, since the NUC was never designed for portable use.

2. Figure out the pinouts of the keyboard/trackpad (I'm guessing they'd both be ADB?) and wire them up to usb using something like this: http://ifixit.org/blog/4468/hack-it-better-apple-extended-keyboard-ii/

3. Either figure out a way to get the built-in display to work with a DVI signal or swap it out for a screen of the same dimensions that does. The latter option might be best if you could find something that would work, since modern versions of OS X (or any OS, really) will be an absolute pain to use with a cramped 800x600 LCD.

After that's all taken care of, the rest should be pretty trivial: mounting all the custom stuff, getting cables for wiring up the headphone/mic ports to those of the NUC, and installing OS X should be pretty straightforward. 

 

[flecom]

think this would be even better

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883722001

built in 4 hour battery