Installing your own Mac OS X – on a non Apple
Bite Me!
- Image via CrunchBase
Trolling and bashing on the internet forums can be fun, but the real fun starts when you have arguments that back you up. Imagine one linux zealot like me engaging in pissing contests with Apple fanboys, Mac users, OS X enthusiasts. The really bad way of losing an argument is due to: “How can you know, you never used it”.
What I did with Vista, I had to do with OS X too. I’ve gone and install OS X on my PC, PC that was not sold by Apple and shouldn’t run OS X anyway. Do you want to know how I did it? My experiences, the nitpicking, the problems and the joys of using OS X? Read on!
I do not own OS X. I might soon, but not at the moment, so I had to do a little digging on where to get OS X and how to get it. I won’t go into too much details, but in the end I installed iPC OSx86 10.5.6. If you know what torrent is, well it will come handy while searching for iPC. The image I had was a DVD image which I burned and booted from. Details on how to do that are not issue of this post so about this maybe some other time.
Installing Hackintosh is not as easy as installing plain old Mac, at least I hope it is not. Due to my ignorance for READ.ME files, tutorials and other stuff I had to install it around six times all together.
Take One
Clicking next and accept through the installation proved to be fatal. Nothing worked OS X didn’t even start boot and I was a little bit grumpy. After some digging I found out that OS X will only boot from an active primary partition on the first disk drive. Great. A lot of data shuffling needed to be done. A LOT. Having few spare disk drives laying around helps and after half a day I had a second primary partition cleaned and I was ready to install. As expected after the installation nothing worked. I got the No Parking Apple logo on my screen and that was all.
Take Two
With iPC you HAVE to customize your installation. Now I had to include all bunch of drivers so that my S/ATA controller will work, so that my graphic cards will work and so on and so on. I included what I felt was necessary. It turned out that it either wasn’t enough or it was too much. But I made progress. I had the mackish blue background in front of me. It faded so nicely, so mackishly into such a pretty mackish gray. Then everything stopped. I was rebooting again.
Take Three
Shouldn’t we do some more reading? People who put together iPC distribution cleverly included their own read me file in the installation. It replaced the License Agreement. Cunning, but very hard to notice since people usually don’t read these, especially when they download an .iso and burn it. So, I’ve read and read and re-read many things on installing OS X. Few basic guidelines:
- check the hardware compatibility list
- stick to it
- select only those drivers that you actually need
- try not to change your hardware configuration too much
So, there I was, my OS X booted up successfully with this hardware:
- Asus P5KC
- Nvidia 8800 GTS 640MB
Just this? Actually yes, only these two mattered since everything else is on the motherboard. Keep reading to see why it didn’t work and how I solved the problems with triple screen configuration, dual card setup and non working CD-ROM.
Take Four
I wasn’t able to mount .dmg files. You see, OS X treats these files as disks or whatever and when you double click on them they are mounted and show up as drives on your desktop. In there, there are programs which you usually drag to your Application folder. Applications is actually a directory that contains all sorts of files, but OS X is smart enough and know which one to execute when you double-click on that folder. Back to .dmg files, double click on .dmg file managed to produce a kernel panic and crashed the system. I had to use different seatbelt kext1 and then .dmg files will work! Yay! How to download it or how to install it was a completely different story altogether. I managed to break the OS X and had to reinstall.
Well, just to clarify here. I could probably fix the system in most of the cases, but since I really don’t want to lose too much time hacking OS X I decided for a complete reinstallation. Each time I screwed up something. Until today.
Take Five
Installation was pretty much straightforward this time and 30 minutes passed quckly tapping on my E71 and chatting on IRC. I found a page on some forum where they tolde me that if I am using 10.5.6 version of iPC I have to use seatbelt.kext from 10.5.5 version. After few tries I managed to install it and I was able to install .dmg files. Battle won! How about the war? Not quite. CD-ROM2 was not working. Something with my motherboard having a JMicron PATA controller and CD-ROM. I had to install the controller driver separately. How, I had no idea. I couldn’t find it on the internet and I couldn’t access it on the CD, since it was not working. Crap! Anyway, I rebooted to Linux, got the bloody driver from installation CD and manage to install it in OS X. Successfully screwing up my already (almost) working installation of OS X. Don’t ask me how I did it. I just did.
Take Six
Reinstall from scratch. This time I managed to select all the drivers correctly during the installation and my OS X booted up nicely. I replaced the broken seatbelt and all was fine.
Where to be extra careful?
- When installing use a primary partition and make sure that it is active
- Do select Customize when you have the opportunity
- Select only drivers that you need: one for graphic card, one for chipset, one for sound and one for ethernet
- Don’t mess with things you don’t understand
- Use the default kernel and bootloader, no real need in selecting an alternative during installation
- If you screw up, you’ll spent a lot of your time googling around in circles
My configuration and drivers
- Asus P5kC Motherboard
- Intel ICHx SATA Drivers
- jMicronATA for JMicron IDE
- ALC883
- Attansic LI Ethernet
- NVidia 8800 GTS 640MB (Dual card setup)
- NVinject 0.2.0 Dual Card
- Other drivers and patches
- SATA Drive Icon Fix (New)
- Seatbelt.kext 10.5.5
- Patched USB Drivers
- Applications
- EFI Studio
- OSx86 Tools Utility
- Kext Helper b7
- Pacifist
- Perian
- MKext Tool
In the end?
- Image by Evil Erin via Flickr
As of now, about two weeks after the installation and around a week of casual use I have to say that OS X feels nice and works quite ok. Most of the time. But! But it has it’s own problems, quirks and few annoyances that will make you pull out your hair if you’re used on some other operating system and I will talk about in another post. In a nutshell, it doesn’t simply works! You have to beat it, many times, over and over again. :)
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