Mac OS X for Intel :: View topic – All possible methods to get it going. — OS-X for X86 is now in the wild. Here is a site you can peruse for more information. Right now the installation process seems needlessly complicated and I assume that will change in the weeks ahead. You can Google for torrent sites that are distributing the code. (one recommended search criteria is “tiger-x86.tar.bz2”) I suspect Apple legal is freaked out about this and a fuss will be made shortly. In other words I expect these American-based torrents to be shut down by the end of the week and the code to end up on dark sites in Europe. Meanwhile I’d like to hear from any readers who install and test this software.
WARNING: YOU MUST PICK ONE SOLUTION AND WORK WITH IT, FOLLOW EVERY STEP. ONE OF THE THREE SOLUTIONS SHOULD WORK FOR YOU. ONLY SSE3 OR SSE2 PROCESSORS WILL WORK. FOR MORE HELP, VISIT THE LINKS AT THE END
AUTHORS ASSUME NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR DAMAGED SOFTWARE/HARDWARE IS CANNOT BE HELD LEGALLY FOR OBTAINING THE SOFTWARE REQUIRED TO PERFORM THE FOLLOWING STEPS!
THIS PAGE CONTAINS ALL THE WORKING GUIDES TO INSTALLING OSX86 ONTO ANY SSE3 COMPATIBLE MACHINE. ONE OF THE SIX SOLUTIONS SHOULD WORK FOR YOU, IF IT DOESN’T, THEN YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT FULLY SUPPORT SSE2 OR SSE3.
Stop SHOUTING!
Mac on x86, but then PPC Mac on the Xbox 360, which will be the big boon. 🙂 Modding XP SP2 for 360 will be a boon too.
But shutting down torrents is impossible, it’s like the Soviets trying to jam radio signals. Pity the fool that dares try. Even the RIAA wasn’t stupid enough to try and shut down a protocol and do something beyond insane, like sue Bram. And if it’s shut offa torrents — impossible, but if so, then it will just move to FTPs and direct connect P2P. The complexity will keep it out of all but the mod community, and the illegality will keep it underground. Just something for hardware hackers such to fool around with. No one knows of it now, and if they go crazy, and seed lawyers, then the world will. The best thing that ever happened to the popularity of file sharing was, ironically, the RIAA. Plus torrenting is still a ‘geek slash gadget freak’ thing, and the amount of time it takes getting torrents, keeps it out of general mainstream audiences, that is, maybe until Apple (or someone else) creates a big enough of a stink to make torrent a verb.
I went over and took a look at the array of procedures and hoops to jump through required to make this work and I’m reminded of a guy who belonged to the same unofficial organization I was a member of as a lad, dedicated to driving very, very fast under illegal circumstances. He actually managed to shoehorn a supercharged Chrysler Hemi into a Morris Minor, absent the hood, of course. It could reach incredible speeds in very few seconds — if you could keep it on the road.
He thought the effort was worth it.
At this level of development, I guess there are a small number of hackers out there willing to put up with the kludge before and after the fact — to make this run.
What really is significant is that there are millions of folks who absolutely would like to dump Windows and stuff OS X under the hood of their PC. Probably tens of millions who don’t even know about this discussion; but, as likely to switch, if and when the opportunity is properly and easily presented.
It’s working on two machines (Pentium 4 and Dual Opteron) here(SSE2 only). Works great, except you can’t run Mac programs since there’s no SSE3. Can’t run iTunes either. On the faster machine(dual opteron with a lot of ram), it is totally usable. There’s a quadro in the opteron, and a ti4400 in the p4.
It’s really exciting to watch OS X boot up on a regular pc. I still don’t think I’ll switch, because I love my apps, but it’s definitely a fun experiment for a weekend.
The installation will supposedly require its own isolated hard-drive, which is a shame. OSX is good for many things, but not for everything. I formatted one of my partitions 2 days ago. I would have loved to make it an OSX partition, but I ended up with 2 Linux partitions. Two birds (penguins) with one stone (physical drive)…
Hey John, I got this running no problem both in VMWare and native on my AMD 64 2800 box. Runs like crap in VMWare but is shockingly fast on a native install. I’m with you all the way on Apple’s plans for the future – and after seeing this running on my PC, I’m pretty excited about it.
“The installation will supposedly require its own isolated hard-drive, which is a shame.”
Yeah, what a shame. We all know how f-ing expensive hard drives are nowadays.
John is absolutely right when he said on This Week in Tech that this is the most exciting thing to ever happen in the industry.
I got wind of this the middle of last week and had it running on my Dell Dimension 8400 by Saturday night. Much of that time was spent downloading torrents, but once I found the image install method it was a piece of cake.
I know that I haven’t been this excited about a technology product in the 19 years I’ve been in the industry.
As a Mac user, I find it odd to read of all the interest in being able to boot into Mac OSX on a PC.
Are there any programs that run (iLife, etc), or is it just the novelty of the OS booting?
I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 (has SSE2) that is almost kaput. I just got a new hard drive to replace the one that’s dying. Since I’m losing everything anyway, I’m gonna see if I can make myself a Delabook.
IMHO, it’s very likely Steve Jobs is reading this particular blog himself and the Apple development team is reading posts of the solutions to issues all these modders are coming up with, as this is Apple’s ALPHA release for tiger-x86.
Mark my words: there’ll never be a version that doesn’t require a whole HD. You have to scrap that Microsoft OS and use the Apple one!
The most exciting thing to happen since I gave away my Apple IIe and bought myself a PC.
😀
Mike Voice
If the PC is SSE3 capable, AND as te right networking/audio/graphics chips (it seems most motherboards with intel’s 915 chipset work), the OS is fully functional.
Its also very very fast. Faster than windows running on the same hardware. Most are reporting its faster than the dual 2.7GHz G5s!! And you can build a “Hack-intosh” from scratch for 200 bucks!
Looking at the performance on intel, it really looks like PowerPC was holding Apple back.
On the Inspirion 8600, it was fairly simple to get it running. You don’t need to give OSX it’s own drive, just a primary partition. Currently, I’m triple booting Windows Xp, OS X, and Suse Linux 9.2 (using suse’s grub bootloader).
I would just like to say I hate the apple GUI… It’s too… gui.
Genie menus, unlabled buttons.. its almost as bad as popup baloons and MS media player. If its not usably fast, its not fast. Get rid of that stuff, and then we’ll talk speed.
So why do it? Final cut. Motion. You name it. If they release it for the PC I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Question, how many people are getting online with these copys? I would imagine the OS would callback, no?