so it turns out now that i got networking to work that the laptop had a few more issues that needed to be worked out.

so here’s the final list of things needed to get snow leopard to work on the asus g51j-a1:

empire efi boot disk – this is where the magic all started. burn this onto a disk, boot, and then load up the retail disk.

netkas’ nvidia injector to get 1920×1080 resolution working on the LCD.

10.6.2 ComboUpdate from apple. the kernel that comes with 10.6.2 supports the i7 CPU.

VoodooPS2, VoodooHDA for keyboard/trackpad and audio functionality. the audio turned out to have a lot of static that i didn’t hear until i started to stream some video.

superhai’s VoodooBattery to get the battery meter to work.

netkas’ fakeSMC to get istat menus’s CPU temperature monitor to work.

once i swapped the intel wifi 1000 bgn wireless card with the dell 1510, wireless worked out of the box. bluetooth also worked out of the box. reboot works, but i am still having some trouble with sleep and shutdown.

i just installed chameleon boot loader 2.0-RC4 and replaced the annoying theme that the empire EFI boot disc installs with something a little less painful to look at.

win7 boots fine in vmware. what i wasn’t sure about was whether or not a VM that i installed on the win7 partition would boot up from OSX, but after NTFS-3G was installed for read/write access to the win7 drive, the VM boots up just fine. talk about great re-use of hard drive space on the laptop.

one unexpected thing is that istat menus’ bandwidth meter does not work. i ended up installing both istat menus and menu meters to get all of the meters i wanted in the menu bar.