i've been fighting the bootloaders using AVR dude on my windows computers but i'd much rather do it on my MAC by take an old arduino NG board pop a brand new ATmega 8 check from digi-key in it and connnect my USBtinyISP to the ISP header pins on the NG board and press a button in arduino 10 to get it to burn. Is this assumption correct? Has anyone done this yet? or is it still a pain and a magic act to get an Arduino Bootloader on these ATmega 8 and ATmega 168 chips? The type of Mac is irrivent to me i have PPC and x86 macs all over.
The USBtinyISP has trouble burning the bootloader onto an Arduino NG. I think the problem is related to the circuit for the pin 13 led, since pin 13 is also one of the SPI pins used for burning the chip. The AVRISP mkII works though, or you could put the chip in another (non-NG) board. Does your NG have the led on pin 13? If so, removing it might fix the problem, but I've never tried it (and I'm not a hardware guy).