I spent the last two weeks experimenting with Mac OS X on a standard PC. The challenge was a mighty one I must admit. There’s several Hackintosh sites out there with a multitude of descriptions of what to do. The art is to pick the ones that are suitable for you.
I started out with an older PC I still had around a DELL Optiplex GX260. It has a P4 1.8Ghz with 512Mb ram and an 80Gb HDD fitted. The board has a Intel 845 chipset with integrated graphics.
- Get your spanking new OS X Leopard DVD and treat it to the BrazilMac patch
- Since the P4 1.8Ghz is SSE2 only you will now have to do soem kernel acrobatics and install an SSE2 compatible kernel.
- Now format HDD and install
- Reboot PC and install some more kernel patches
- Install some more dodgy patches to files
- Hunt for more dodgy drivers….
- Mac OS X is working ….well sort of.
It runs all the apps I tried but it definitely has stability issues. I couldn’t get my network card to work although it is the same the MacPros use. The graphics card would only do 1024×768 (Leopard only has drivers for the Intel chipsets above and including 915). And when you booted you needed the Leopard DVD in the drive.
So all in all not that successful. Although I have to say I was impressed that it worked at all! I never thought it possible at least not on an old crappy machine as this DELL was. The speed was amasingly fast and responsive and even the desktop effects worked well. I learned a whole LOT about how Leopard works and what clever guys those Apple developers really are (and of course those Open Source tid bits!). But I also learned that as nice as hacking like that is it is still no replacement for a mac by a long shot. You wouldn’t use this on a productive system it is just too unstable. And to be honest, who would go and try and replace Apples gorgeous hardware?
So now I’ll kill the partition and use the PC for the second best thing after Mac OS X. Install Ubuntu (again) or gOS or Xubuntu or Suse or …. well an OS that works on this hardware.
[Update] The Dell now runs this Webserver on Ubuntu.
[Update] This post seems to attract quite some attention. So if you have any inputs on how to get Leopard running on such a machine feel free to leave some hints in the comments.
Tags: Hackintosh, Mac OS X