Anyone use a mac?

[Danielx386]

Yeah anyone using a mac here? Thinking about installing the os on my home built pc. Will it work?

[Smith6612]

You can install the Mac OS on a normal PC. That however would be called Hackintoshing for the most part and Apple frowns upon that.

[Danielx386]

Yeah, just I don't wnat to spend $3000 on mac hardware.

[Mr. DOS]

Tried the Hackintosh thing and it kinda flopped on the hardware I was using. I did have to do some work with a Mac-specific application (RapidWeaver around this time last year, and I wasn't terribly impressed.

--- Mr. DOS

[Danielx386]

^ what the drivers like? will it work on any pc?

[casey roberts]

The hackintosh community has a wiki that lists all known supported hardware. Some configurations are better than others, but basically anything with a core duo or above will run leopard. I had a dual core intel gateway desktop that ran Tiger just fine. The installation process involves downloading a hacked version of the OS X install disk that allows it to boot on a bios (as opposed to OS X's EFI). Then you generally have to find drivers for your hardware; video cards, ethernet, wireless, sound, etc.

[Mr. DOS]

will it work on any pc?

Kinda not really. There are various ways, including replacement kernels, to get a wider range of generic hardware working, but your best bet at a usable, stable machine is to have low-level hardware (CPU, chipset, etc.) fairly similar to that in actual Intel-based Macs.

what the drivers like?

Bad, unless your machine's overall hardware is fairly similar to that of an actual Mac model. Actually, it's more like nonexistent. There really isn't that much in the way of community-written drivers yet.

Overall, Hackintoshing reminds me very much of what trying to run Linux circa 1999 was probably like: it works good if you know what you're doing and have the right hardware, but if you don't, prepare for pain.

--- Mr. DOS