How to have a Mac without the branding costs! - Hackintosh

[ralgith]

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Last year I began experimenting with building "Hackintosh" machines. These are Mac OS X (I use Snow Leopard) machines built using standard PC hardware. After all, the Intel Macs are 99.9999% standard hardware now, and you just pay a shit ton of money for the aesthetic look of it and the apple branding. So, now I run OS X Snow Leopard in a Virtual Machine and I'm hoping to have access to a Core 2 Duo CPU & Motherboard soon on which to build a proper Hackintosh machine.

For those who want to have a super cheap "MacBook Air" (Mac Netbook) check out this link and choose a Netbook to buy based on their compatibility with OS X! ASUS Eee PC by far rocks this as almost all of the different models have 100% compatibility with OS X. I've played with the Eee PC 901 and 1005HAB models running Snow Leopard and they work great.
http://www.mymacnetbook.com/compatibility-chart/

I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here and write my own tutorial, instead I'm just going to provide you with all the links that have helped me.

OS X Snow Leopard on VMWare or VirtualBox:
http://lifehacker.com/5583650/run-mac-os...on-windows - VirtualBox. This is what I recommend using.
http://lifehacker.com/5435481/run-snow-l...in-windows - VMWare. Really good tutorial for VMWare 7/8/9. I've done this one too.
http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-install...7-9140301/ - For VMWare 7, 8, and 9. I've personally tested it on 7 and 8.
http://geeknizer.com/install-snow-leopard-virtualbox/ - Another for VirtualBox
http://geeknizer.com/how-to-install-snow...n-windows/ - And another for VMWare

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index....are_how_to - Pretty outdated. Just for general reference.

Building a real Hackintosh (No particular order, explore them all):
http://lifehacker.com/348653/install-os-...g-required - In my opinion the best of the tutorials for this, but your mileage may vary.
http://lifehacker.com/5672051/how-to-bui...easy-steps - Really good tutorial on how to do it from scratch. Hopefully Twitch just uses this when her iMac takes a shit post warranty and saves herself a few grand on the Apple branding lol
http://lifehacker.com/5351485/how-to-bui...-to-finish
http://lifehacker.com/5360150/install-sn...g-required
http://www.koushikdutta.com/2009/04/buil...-to-k.html
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-inst...ing-a-mac/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSx86 - This wiki has a metric shit ton of good information and resources, including some legal info. Which is all horse shit from Apple since Apple is built on top of Darwin, a free and open source UNIX OS. Fuckers. That "standing on the shoulders of giants" shit and their ridiculous markup for branding is why I hate Apple with such passion.
http://geeknizer.com/how-to-install-snowosx-universal/
http://ipcosx86.wikidot.com/

http://www.imacx86.com/2010/04/iboot-mul...-based-pc/ - Currently down and domain for sale... just linked in case this is corrected.

[John L]

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Interesting. I may try to make one just to try out.

Thanks

[ralgith]

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Interesting. I may try to make one just to try out.

Thanks

Here's my Snow Leopard build on some old hardware. Other than sound being a little flaky and the video driver not liking my card causing the mouse to jump around sometimes it worked great. And since it was just a test run with very old hardware I had on hand instead of using hardware from the compatibility list; I thought it was pretty good.

   
   
   


And these are screenshots of me running it in VMWare playing chess
   
   

[John L]

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I'm ordering a new computer in the next couple of days, and perhaps one of my extra units could be converted. I could either go with Mac or Linux.

Which do you recommend?

[ralgith]

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I'm ordering a new computer in the next couple of days, and perhaps one of my extra units could be converted. I could either go with Mac or Linux.

Which do you recommend?

Well, I'm a Linux lover. I've recently switched to Mageia myself, but I also use CentOS (mainly for my server, but also for my Model RR master computer). However, that said... why not do both? Make them dual boot on it. Its a little more tricky, but IMO it'll be worth it. When I redo my laptop to Mageia, I plan on replacing the idiotic Windows XP partition that I've never used with a Mac OS X Snow Leopard partition. It just means you need to be more careful with your installation. Do Linux first and manually create your partitions for it so that you can leave space for a Mac OS X partition. If you want to wait a couple weeks (at most, I need to replace the power jack and do some file backups first) I can give you a step by step for dual booting Mageia 2 and OS X Snow Leopard.

[John L]

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Why don't I just try one. My little 'pea' brain can only handle so much at a time. Besides, I have to keep up with the political world, and that requires a lot of effort. So I only have 'X' amount of brain space remaining.

I've been meaning to go with Linux. I even had that one everybody has been raving about for several years now(forgotten the name at this moment), but never took the time to learn it all. My Bad!

Oh, it was Ubuntu.

[ralgith]

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Well, give Mageia a trial run. You don't even have to install it. Just download both LiveCD (by which I mean GNOME and KDE, use 32 or 64 bit as appropriate) versions (so you can play with both desktops, KDE is more Windows Like, but I prefer GNOME) and reboot with the CD in the drive to play w/out installing.

http://www.mageia.org/en/downloads/

Feel free to shoot me a PM or email dylan@dylanspcs.com if you have questions/need help

[John L]

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If you get a chance, why don't you go to my new thread, about using an SSD for primary drive, and regular HHD for primary storage? You probably know a good deal about those new SSDs, and where to bone up on it all. I'd like to do this on that new HP computer I have coming in.