I actually did it because of the application called Compressor. Compressor is widely recommended for frame rate conversion and probably the only one that is that cheap (~USD45).
Within last 6 months or so the Niresh distribution got very popular so I used it as it supported the AMD cpus but frankly it was like the road through chaos. Not sure if this was thanks to Niresh or my mobo (ausus m5a97 pro). I needed v10.8 at least and first I wanted to put it inside a vbox (Oracle) but I did not manage with any of the available versions (8.2, 8.5, 9.0) - almost instant kernel panic. After half a day or so I gave up. Next I tried to boot it directly from the DVDs/BD images but the story was similar only that the panic occurred at the later stages. Then in the act of desperation I tried the USB versions and... it worked for 8.5 and 9.0 (WTF?). Now, i could get to the setup screen but could not get any mouse working. There are dozens of cases like this with the solution described and none of them worked for me. When I was close to giving up I discovered that actually my usb keyboard/mouse dongle work in two specific ports (out of 10 or so on this mobo) but only if it is connected directly (not via the KVM switch I used but later worked fine with any USB ports with another KVM switch I bought recently - WTF2?). This was roughly the happy end - I only needed to remove some intel power management related kexts (another kernel panic).
What does not work and I noticed it:
- the mouse can not get restored from the suspension mode
- graphics in hi-res (GeForce 8400 GS) - managed to get it to 1400x1050@60 only)
- keyboard mapping is screwed
For this single Compressor application I don't care too much, it is stable when I use it and much faster than on my MBAir i5/2cores.
Plus it looks nice on a bigger screen.
This is how System Info sees it:
Code: Select all
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro3,1
Processor Name: 6-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3.31 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 6
L2 Cache: 2 MB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: Niresh12495.com
SMC Version (system): 1.30f3