So, What do you do?

…when you think you’ve done everything you could possibly do to (with?) your PC?

You turn it into a Mac of course!

Please don’t get into a discussion with me about Apple’s EULA for the Mac OS. Since I have gotten this working, I have done two things. First, I purchased a Leopard License (actually, I bought the Family 3-pack, in case I want to do it again), and I put a nice apple sticker on the back of my PC, so that it is “Apple Branded” now…(that was their terminology, not mine).

Now, here is a little commentary on setting it up.

First…it was easy. It was very easy. I downloaded the iPC Leopard 10.5.6 .iso (don’t ask me where to get it), which is simply a Leopard image with patches and drivers to make it easy to install on a BIOS enabled PC (Apple computers do not have a BIOS if you didn’t know - that’s why you need Boot Camp to install Windows). I checked the OSX86 Wiki and the iPC Blog/Website and gather information and instructions before beginning. Luckily on the Wiki, I found others who had my motherboard, and other similar hardware, so it was easy to know what drivers to select when installing the OS (apparently it’s *bad* to install drivers you don’t need - apparently confuses the kernel). Other than that, it was as easy as any other OS install I’ve ever done.

The good:

Everything works - Video Works (w/ Quartz Extreme), Sound, Networking, Sleep…everything - it’s just like a “real” Mac, just in a much cooler case (both literally, and figuratively).

Why did I do it? Well, I like the Mac OS (duh!). I had a MacBook Pro through work, but I had to give that guy up to someone who needed it more than I did, and I missed having a Mac. When I build this new PC I not only wanted to buy a Mac, I really considered it. However, the only problem was, all I could have afforded was a bare bones, lowest end (last gen) MacBook, or a slightly upgraded Mac Mini - neither of which would have given me the performance I would have wanted.

So, what did I end up with by doing this? Basically, I have the performance of a nicely upgraded MacPro. Here are the “basic” specs of my “H4ck|nt0$h”:

• Intel Core2Quad Q6600 (Overclocked to 3.0GHz)
• 8GB DDR2 800 RAM
• WD VelociRaptor 10K System Drive
• WD 7.2K 320 & 1TB Data drives

The result, a very fast Mac system - I’m blown away by the speed. Since building this PC, I’ve played around with OSes (that’s nothing new for me, if you’ve followed this blog), I have had WinXP x64, Win Vista x64, Win7 Beta x64, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu x64 and Fedora x64. All were fast (this is a fast machine regardless), but nothing and I mean  nothing compares to Leopard on this box. It boots very quickly (wish it bypassed all that BIOS crap like a “real” Mac though), applications launch instantaneously, and this afternoon I purchased VMware Fusion and loaded it, and it’s one heck of a nice Virtualization platform as well (for those who are wondering, I decided to go “premium” and get VMware instead of using VirtualBox, because who knows what Oracle will do with VirtualBox once they get ahold of it - plus VMware does perform a little better).

Now, this may seem absurd to some of you who haven’t been around Mac’s very long, but “back in the day” Mac Clones were fairly common - I had one of these guys and it was a heck of a machine - far more machine than I could have afforded had I gone Apple.

(steps onto soapbox)

I really hope Apple will pull their heads out of the sand, and look at this HUGE “OSX86″ community that has sprouted - it’s by far as big of a community as many mainstream Linux distros - people helping each other get this to work, and it’s gotten surprisingly easy. If a bunch of “geeks” out on the web can build PC’s with off-the-shelf components and/or just buy a Dell or HP and load Leopard on it, why on earth Apple, won’t you just leave them (and Pystar) alone, and let them do it! Don’t you realize how many people hate Vista, and what it would do to your market share and installed base? Get with the 21st century.

(steps down from soapbox, and goes back to playing with his “Mac”)