[Tfug] 2 weeks of Hackintosh fun..

[Bowie J. Poag]

Hi Shawn,

Familliar at all with iDeneb, iATKOS, JaS, Kalyway, at all?

Each one is basically a Darwin live CD with different kernels that allow 
you to OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. Some are more "helpful" than 
others, when it comes to the eventual goal of getting a working OS X 
install. :)  That's the easy way.  The hard way is to roll your own 
Darwin install, then pour OS X into the cracks until you have a viable 
system. That's what I did in the end. Not for the faint of heart, 
however... Be prepared to whip out the old-school knowhow for the 
heavier stuff. Sometimes it isn't easy to get things to behave in the 
way you want them to behave.

For example...From what i've read, (and what I hope i'm recounting here 
accurately) a big hurdle was to get around OS X's dependency on Intel 
processor-specific instructions like SSE2 and SSE3. This precluded OS X 
from running on anything but certain Intel hardware. It took someone to 
build a Darwin kernel with SSE2/SSE3 instruction emulation. Doing so 
allows OS X to run not only on other Intel-based hardware, but AMD-based 
hardware as well..

Another example. Sound. Apple has binary-only drivers for the hardware 
used in their machines.... but obviously, the company they went with 
produces more than one sound card for more than one platform. To get 
things working, you, the geek, need change driver config to notice the 
slightly different PCI vendor ID string your particular hardware 
presents to the bus. Simple fix, just a text file edit, but underlying 
knowledge of what you're looking at is still required.

Worst case I can think of had to do with wifi... Having to extract, hex 
edit, and push (and possibly brick) new firmware on the card itself in 
order for a particular binary driver from Apple to see and use the 
device. Yikes.

Cheers,
Bowie







Shawn Nock wrote:
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> Maybe we take this off-list.
>
> I am interested in the subject matter and not interested in "calling you
> out" in TFUG. Obviously, I could have done a better job.
>
> In reference to running Mac OS X on third-party hardware:
> http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20080827153357243
>
> Section 18 & 19 of the complaint by Apple states that the software may
> only be installed on "Apple labeled hardware". The more important part
> of this source, is that it is a concrete example of Apple suing an
> entity for installing it's software on third-party machines.
>
> We both know how unlikely it is that they would sue you, but I think
> that this is dangerous none the less.
>
> Also, for general background. It wasn't clear until very late in the
> thread that you were running some form of Darwin under the hood. Most of
> the freedom arguments were assuming that when you were talking about
> MacOS that you were talking about the bundled OS/desktop environment
> sold by Apple... While the Darwin source corresponds to the 10.5
> release, it seems like much was left out.
>
> I am interested to know if you did an "overlay" type install of Darwin
> on Leopard or another method.
>
> Peace,
> Shawn
>
>
> - --
> Shawn Nock (OpenPGP: 0x4E549994)
> nock at fastmail dot fm
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