Mac OS X

Some of you may have read my initial, extremely short and uninformative post about installing Mac OS X on my PC. Well I got a little bit ahead of myself after installing that, soon realizing that I couldn’t actually do much with the PC as I was having a lot of incompatibility problems, drivers, and so on. Enjoying the challenge, I decided to keep looking around and I eventually found another, considerably better ISO image for Mac OS X (x86), running a later version (10.4.8) and patched for SSE2 and SSE3 CPU’s.

So, if you’re up for it google for ‘mac jas 10.4.8 sse2 sse3′ and download the image from your favourite torrent site. Burn the image and at the boot screen push F8 and the enter ‘-v’ to get verbose output during the install so you can see if something goes screwy. Make sure to uncheck printer drivers and only install what you need, also use the disk utility from the Utilities menu and make a Mac partition for yourself. I decided to leave some free space and not use the entire partition as I was going to try and run a dual boot configuration, but a bit more on that later.

Once installed I was faced with the driverless config of old, this time I was not installing it on my PC but on my older notebook, which is a HP Compaq NX7000 (Pentium M 1.5GHz [SSE2], 1.25 GB RAM, Bluetooth, ATI Mobility Radeon 9200, Built in 802.11b, etc) I managed to source some drivers for the Radeon 9200 which worked pretty well and allowed me to change the resolution to the native 1680×1050 offered by my laptop. I installed Microsoft Office Mac 2004 successfully, firefox and some other apps with no problem. Having such a crummy graphics card in the laptop does limit the performance some what because it does not offer something called “Quartz Extreme” or QE so the GUI is not as quick as a native mac or SSE3 machine, but it is still very useable, just don’t try and watch any videos in full screen or use OpenGL applications.

Once I had my laptop working pretty well I decided I would try the install on my more suited PC which I described in my last post (Pentium 4, SSE3, Geforce 6600). This time it was much more successful as I managed to find some drivers by the name of ‘Titan’ I suggest you check these out if you have an Nvidia card, otherwise, visit this site to check your hardware compatibility and possible driver links for what you need. The Osx86 Project has some awesome resources so browse around their site, you are almost certain to find what you need. After all my pain my PC runs Mac OS X extremely well with full video acceleration, and I have had no compatibility problems as yet so I think I have a winner there, but its just not as convenient as a laptop :]

OK, Jumping around a bit here, but after installing Mac OS X on my laptop, using the ‘free space’ I had allocated during the install, I tried to go ahead and install Ubuntu 7 on that partition, at first it wiped my boot loader for Mac, but after reading some guides I found that editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and adding in my Mac partition to the boot list, this problem was solved, and, I was seriously impressed with Ubuntu, it still boggles my mind that such great software is available for free. I think I have found my new home development environment, I installed all my development tools (Eclipse / XAMPP), hardware and personal items with such ease, the Ubuntu developers are definately on to something good hopefully they’ll get the community support they need (or enough of shuttleworth’s $$$) ;]

If anyone has any questions about my configuration of these operating systems don’t hesitate to ask, I will see what I can do to assist you, although I know very little on the subject :]

Good luck!

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