Fooling around with this Hackintosh stuff
Kevin is thinking that he wants to get another Mac, since his current iMac G5 has the distinct problem of not being a laptop, and thus staying in Sunnyvale, while he is ping-ponging back and forth between work (San Jose) and the girlfriend (Bakersfield).
But unfortunately for Kevin, none of the available Mac portables meet his "ergonomic requirements". Meaning, that Kevin is a weirdo, and thinks that he prefers Lenovo Thinkpads, and wants a Mac that's pretty much like that.
So, I goaded him into performing an experiment. A couple of years ago, he went on a PC desktop buying spree, and thus has a few machines laying around. So, we took his 2+-year-old Sony Vaio VGC-RC110G desktop, and tried to install Mac OS X on it.
I have to say, while I do pay a cursory amount of attention to the Mac OS X hacking community, that I have been pretty impressed with what I have found. Not only has the community produced a modified version of Mac OS X that installs on commodity PCs, but they have also gone ahead and hacked up extra drivers, to support a more diverse array of hardware. Even more impressive, work has gone into making the installation process rather simple. We downloaded a hacked Leopard install DVD, burned it, and that was pretty much all that we had to do in order to get Kevin's Vaio running OS X.
Emboldened, I decided to resurrect my old Shuttle SN95G5. The last time I played with it (well over a year ago), it was hanging during the BIOS POST, so I thought that it was screwed. But, I installed FreeBSD 7 on it, and gave the hardware a good workout, and it seems to be working. I guess that letting it take a year off fixed it.
So, I tried to install Mac OS X on it. This machine is over 3 years old, and has an AMD CPU, but nevertheless, the hacked OS X DVD did boot, and the installer runs to completion. Unfortunately, on subsequent boot, the kernel panics, I think due to the SATA driver. Since I'm just playing around, I don't think that I'm going to invest a ton of time in this, but my results from a weekend of fooling around have been encouraging. I still don't know that I would run a Hackintosh as a primary machine, but it certainly is interesting to fool around with.
Here are some screen shots that I took from Kevin's Vaio:
About this hackintosh.
What Mac OS X thinks about the CPU.
-Andy.