OSX on x86 PC

[The ORIGINAL South Of Heaven]

http://www.uneasysilence.com/os-x-proven-hacked-and-running-on-an-ordinary-pc/

I know some of you on here are diehard Mac users, I was just curious what everybody thought about this, assuming everything runs properly.

 

[Razorjack]

I ran a live CD version of this the other day (it helps to have friends who build Operating Systems for a living), it's actually really good but I'm still buying myself a powerbook.

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

interesting stuff

 

[Kazrog]

I have to wonder how this would interact with different hardware configurations, etc., and I wonder how stable it would be on different PCs.

I don't see this as a major threat to Apple, most of the people who will run this are geek types. Both the average person and the professional are going to want genuine, supported hardware. Plus, I think the copy protection is going to be tightened up before final release.

All that being said, I would love to pick up an Intel box just to play around with this!

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Should be nice for people like me who want to switch to Mac but know nothing about the IU, could be like a learning tool before getting the real one (hence, on spare time) and not waste precious time when the G5 arrives. If only I could get this damn thing to work tho (not booting)

 

[black sugar]

I spent a little time researching this today and it looks like you have to have very specific hardware for everything to work well. Makes sense, because that's what makes Macs so bulletproof -- Apple having control over the hardware that is needed to run the OS.

Also, from what I understand, you need to do a native install (so as to evenutally not use Vmware) to get any kind of speed out of it, and you need Rosetta to run all the applications that don't have ported x86 builds, which slows things down. The iLife suite has evidently been x86 compatible for quite some time. Sneaky bastards!

Most of the info on this project is pretty fragmented at best, so I could be wrong on some of the above...

So yeah, it might be fun to play with and familiarize yourself, but in the end you might as well buy a Mac Mini if you don't already have hardware that's "supported".

Anyway, here are some good links that I found:


Install instructions:
http://www.xplodenet.com/

Working hardware list:
http://www.concretesurf.co.nz/osx86/viewtopic.php?t=548&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&lighter=

 

[SPLASTiK]

A lot of people think Apple left it pretty easy to port because they wanted to see how long it would take and what the intrest would be. Also it sets them up for lawsuits if people try to port the upcoming consumer release and pirate it as I'm sure will be the case.

When the official release is out the security measures will be a lot tougher, and many speculate that the support for a variety of hardware will diminish greatly.

It's still pretty sweet though, you can spend $200 and have a computer (minus monitor) thats capable of running OSX. And even if they can't crack the consumer releases, I'm sure a lot of geeks will start modding the dev kit to run other software and make it more stable, faster, etc.

 

[sorceron]

from what ive read alot of people cant get the sound to work though.

 

[Razorjack]

from what ive read alot of people cant get the sound to work though.

Works fine for me with my laptop on-board sound. Most problems will come from people who use soundcards that won't work in mac's at all (Creative).

 

[sorceron]

Works fine for me with my laptop on-board sound. Most problems will come from people who use soundcards that won't work in mac's at all (Creative).

you think something like the mbox would work?

 

[Kazrog]

you think something like the mbox would work?

If the USB port works, I see no reason why not. However, Pro Tools (and almost any other Mac program) is compiled for PowerPC and not for Intel, so it will run in Rosetta mode and take a substantial speed hit.

 

[sorceron]

i just need to get a mac. *sigh*

 

[Mulder]

There was one guy who thought it to be very strange that it ran so fast on an Intel, turns out a major part of OSX -according to him- was from day one written for X86!!

I guess that (partly) explains the very poor performance of Logic 6.x on OSX.2.8 on my former Dual 886 MDD G4 I had to endure for over a year..

Running WinXP now for some time, not going back. Just picked up some prog that lets you run ProTools TDM 6.9 on my Digi 001!!! (WinXP only, alas..=) )

Apple seems to focus on seniors who want to play with kiddiemovies and send eachother photo's of their favorite pet and people with less need for brains and more for lifestyle, people who use a cpu for (native!) musicproduction can better switch to WinXP at this moment.
OS9 -and earlier- was great, worked for years with it. OSX is all 'windowdressing' with a serious speedhit and stabillityproblem in my experience. Maybe 10.4 is better, but with 10.2.8 they left me out there to fornucate myself for almost a year while I was using Apple hardware and Apple software. I guess they were counting on my everlasting loyalty so they didn't had to focus on making my program run smooth like OS9 and get rid of the faults that made it crash several times a day.

Build a WinXP setup running Logic 5.5.1 to be able to work again and never looked back. Cheap as hell, fast as lighting, much more stable. Total stable if you get rid of the plugins that aren't compatible. Put a Digi 001 in it, PTLE rocks.

And now it turns out a Pentium 3.6 with OSX is faster then a dual 2.5 G5. That's also a nasty habit of Apple, they always lie about the performance of their machines, thinking their deciples will buy it anyway so they can brag about it in public..

So I hope the coming Macintel with a dual core Pentium-M like cpu will at last show some real (& stable) performance for a real price and can be compared with real WinXP hardware.

About friggin time.