OS X fling

'Bout 3 weeks ago, I have performed the unimaginable (at least in the last decade or so), and even in some circles, a sacrilegious act.

I have installed OS X on an x86 machine and was successful running it. As a matter of fact, I just had an eerie feeling just looking at the boot-up screen, it's as if hell froze or Microsoft made Windows open source.

Anyway, if you're interested, keep on reading.... Disclaimer: Do this at your own risk.

Here are the steps:

Pre-installation requirements:
a. You need an external USB storage device with at least 7GB capacity. An iPod will work well here.

b. A spare HD with at least 10GB of free space.

c. A LiveCD of any Linux flavor you prefer. And NO, don't get me started about Linspire (Lindows, whatever) being a Linux distro. Grab something real like Ubuntu, Gentoo, Redhat or Suse. In this experiment, I used the Ubuntu LiveCD.

d. An image of the OS X tiger install. Remember kids, it is NOT right to download "tiger-x86-flat.img" from BitTorrent sites like piratebay.org if you are not licensed to do so. ;) Typically, it's a 1.2ish GB *.rar file.

Installation

1. Once you're done downloading the image rar, extract the contents to your external USB device. If you're using Windows, WinRar works well (from rarlabs.com). Total extracted size should be approximately 6GB.

2. Boot with your LiveCD. Make sure you set your BIOS to boot from CD. If you don't know how to do that, this project is not for you. Just kidding, consult your mobo manual for details. Usually the option to boot from CD is in the boot priority menu. For safety's sake, just unplug your primary harddrive and make sure that the only HD plugged-in is your 10GB HD from b..

3. Once Ubuntu finishes loading up its GUI, plug in your USB Storage device. A window should popup that will show something like: /Devices/YourDrivesNameHere

4. Open a terminal window and cd to /Devices/YourDrivesNameHere . Type the command:

dd bs=1048576 if=./tiger-x86-flat.img of=/dev/hda

Remember to replace hda with the other 10GB HD you have on your computer. It will take around 5-7 minutes for that to finish, but your mileage may vary.

5. Shutdown your PC, remove the Ubuntu disc, unplug your USB device and boot from your HD.

Voila! OS X on x86! I'll post some pics once I get the chance.

Current setbacks:

i. If you are using an nVidia or ATI video card, chances are, CoreImage (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/) and QuartzExtreme (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/) will be disabled and OS X will only install a VESA 3 compatible driver. Massive efforts are underway to hack/develop an nVidia driver for OS X native on x86. http://macvidia.plusmediamusic.com/

ii. If your processor does not support SSE3, Rosetta won't run and you won't be able to run PPC compiled programs.

BigD
9/8/05