Hackintoshing Dell 5558

[lewdicrous]

Anyone tried hackintoshing a Dell Inspiron 5558?

If so, what were the hurdles that you had to overcome? I know that the wifi might/won't work, (I'll buy an adapter) but what else was a problem?

Is it better to upgrade from an HDD to an SSD before doing so?

I was thinking of either installing high sierra or mojave (If possible)

If it worked for you, did you try dual booting as well? I'm currently running Ubuntu on mine and might want to continue to use it for some time.

 

Thank you

[SupaKomputa]

this is not a hackintosh forum, your post will be locked soon, i recommend you visit hackintosh related forum out there, just search "osx86 forum" in google.

[lewdicrous]

3 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

this is not a hackintosh forum, your post will be locked soon, i recommend you visit hackintosh related forum out there, just search "osx86 forum" in google.

I've been reading posts about it, but most of them have different specs so I just wanted to make sure mine would work well.

Also, hackintosh discussion is allowed now.

Quote

Any discussion on how to engage in piracy is not allowed, including the discussion of hacking or cracking.

• Discussion of piracy in general is acceptable (e.g. "Game X becomes the most pirated game ever").
• Hackintosh discussion is permitted.

 

[SupaKomputa]

well since it's permitted

hackintoshing is all about motherboard, that is the main hurdle.

if you can solve / hack your way through the motherboard, the other parts is relatively easy to solve.

since you have a branded pc, it's a higher difficulty, because not many hackers have them and can share the problem with you.

if you're lucky that pc shares the same parts as the custom ones than all you have to do is search for particular motherboard models in the forums.

osx installers / bootloaders are getting better, you might get lucky installing without problems.

as for the parts get parts use this page as a reference:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/building-a-customac-hackintosh-the-ultimate-buyers-guide/

 

If so, what were the hurdles that you had to overcome? I know that the wifi might/won't work, (I'll buy an adapter) but what else was a problem?

After the motherboard passed, focus next on the GPU, all nvidia gpu will need a custom driver especially pascal.

Amd gpu some worked out of the box, no drivers needed.

next sound drivers, network and wifi.

i have great success with cheap usb wifi adapter, non branded.

After all hardware fixed the next problem is to solve the OS functionality such as sleep or hybernate.

And then fix the login to icloud so you can access  apps store or use Xcode (the main reason i use hackintosh).
 

Is it better to upgrade from an HDD to an SSD before doing so?
no difference if you have them in sata3.

 

I was thinking of either installing high sierra or mojave (If possible)

I recommend install 1 generation below current for solid operations, newer release might have bug.

 

If it worked for you, did you try dual booting as well? I'm currently running Ubuntu on mine and might want to continue to use it for some time.

I install OSX on a separate hdd, no dual booting needed. I use the bios quick select boot drive (f9) to choose which drive i want to boot.

It's easier and won't mess around with your current OS boot loaders. I have windows and osx in 2 different drive, each had its own bootloaders.

[lewdicrous]

12 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

- snip -

Thanks for the helpful info!

I'll look for more info about the specifics before trying it out.

I had 2 VMs that worked with MacOS (High Sierra and Mojave beta), but I didn't use a bootloader to make those work.

[SupaKomputa]

this might help.

 

Installing to a vm is much easier and there's a lot of ready made packages out there so you can just download and run.

But using on vm lacks gpu accelerations needed for some programs like premiere or finalcut.

[lewdicrous]

1 minute ago, SupaKomputa said:

- snip -

I'll look into it, thanks.

Main problem I had was that the VMs were slow (happened to every OS I tried)

[SupaKomputa]

Yes, it is slow because the hardware emulations.

You're running a computer inside a computer.

It's good if you don't mind the latency.

[lewdicrous]

I hackintoshed my laptop semi-successfully after a few tries.

It took a few days to get it to work the first time, but I had to reinstall it multiple times cause of things that I've done. (Breaking the config, kernel panic loops, messing with audio drivers, etc)

Things that didn't work (or worked, but not consistently/not very well):

1. The built-in WiFi; all intel WiFi cards are not supported. Solution: USB WiFi adapter, if you don't want to replace the card. (Bluetooth worked tho)
2. The audio driver (AppleHDA) didn't seem to work for me even after multiple changes to the config file and multiple new installs. Solution: used a third-party audio driver called VoodooHDA, but the sound wasn't very good. (For me at least)
3. Sleep did not work, whenever I put my laptop to sleep, the screen turns off, but everything else kept running.
4. It wasn't very stable; sometimes it would kernel panic whenever I turn the laptop on, other times it would not shutdown properly. (Leading to me having to force shutdown using the power button)
5. There was no minimum brightness limit; the back light would turn off if I lowered the brightness too much, in turn, you can't see a thing. (There's probably a fix for this, but I didn't bother looking for it)
6. Audio over HDMI didn't work, there's a fix for it I believe, but I didn't try it cause I didn't need it.

These are the things that I remember from that experience, I've since reverted to using Linux. Might get back into hackintoshing if I get the time to tinker with it and/or get another laptop/desktop to try it on.

[Guest]

Try getting an old airport card. It’s usually broadcom or a later atheros? card. They work fine and are around 30 bucks, just make sure the model is fine and you get the WiFi/Bluetooth models.

 

Sleep hardly works. I think I recall that you need to patch your DSDT. 

 

Voodoo is the legacy driver, so it most likely won’t work very well. WiFi and Audio are annoying to get right. 

 

Theres no minimum brightness on Macs either.

 

Audio over HDMI I believe is due to graphics drivers.

[lewdicrous]

6 hours ago, floofer said:

Try getting an old airport card. It’s usually broadcom or a later atheros? card. They work fine and are around 30 bucks, just make sure the model is fine and you get the WiFi/Bluetooth models.

I was gonna get one from Dell, but I couldn't find a supported one locally, so I opted for a $13 USB adapter.

6 hours ago, floofer said:

Sleep hardly works. I think I recall that you need to patch your DSDT.

Yeah I went through it with that in mind, haven't looked for a patch cause by the time it got annoying I've already ruined my install for the nth time.

6 hours ago, floofer said:

Voodoo is the legacy driver, so it most likely won’t work very well. WiFi and Audio are annoying to get right.

Getting WiFi to work was easier for me, audio was the annoying part.

6 hours ago, floofer said:

Theres no minimum brightness on Macs either.

That's interesting, I thought something was broken, I know you can somehow set the limits, but I didn't bother looking for how.

6 hours ago, floofer said:

Audio over HDMI I believe is due to graphics drivers.

Yea, that was another thing I didn't really need, so I didn't bother trying to fix it.

 

[Guest]

12 hours ago, lewdicrous said:

I was gonna get one from Dell, but I couldn't find a supported one locally, so I opted for a $13 USB adapter.

Yeah I went through it with that in mind, haven't looked for a patch cause by the time it got annoying I've already ruined my install for the nth time.

Getting WiFi to work was easier for me, audio was the annoying part.

That's interesting, I thought something was broken, I know you can somehow set the limits, but I didn't bother looking for how.

Yea, that was another thing I didn't really need, so I didn't bother trying to fix it.

 

It’s a struggle, but sometimes worth it. HP laptops are an easier model to hackintosh in future. Dell should be straightforward too. You used to have distros which worked better, but now the multibeast (unibeast? And iBoot) method is best to get the most native MacOS, and then build from there.

[lewdicrous]

6 minutes ago, floofer said:

It’s a struggle, but sometimes worth it. HP laptops are an easier model to hackintosh in future. Dell should be straightforward too. You used to have distros which worked better, but now the multibeast (unibeast? And iBoot) method is best to get the most native MacOS, and then build from there.

Re-hackintoshed my laptop, now I'm trying to get native audio to work, but nothing I tried has been a success.. If I fail a lot then I might just use Voodoo.

Also backlight (brightness settings) doesn't work, forgot which kext fixed it when I last did this..

 

The struggle continues