The one that works the best for you.

I’ve been experimenting some lately – thinking outside the box. I’ve been trying to analyse the way I interact with my computer, and how it changes depending on what Operating System I am using. (Yes, I’m that much of a Nerd). It does make a difference.

I have 3 bootable OSes on my machine at the moment. Over the past week or so, I’ve not been “suspending” my machine, but rather shutting it down, and I’ve set my BIOS to display a boot menu. I have to consciously decide which OS.

My choices?

Fedora 11 Snapshot

Windows 7 RC

Leopard (Hackintosh/OSX86)

Each OS is very different, and have different interfaces. Which is the best, which is the worst? I don’t think I can answer that. I have come to some conclusions though.

Fedora is very interesting, and I’m constantly learning something, and trying new things. As much as I like it, and enjoy learning more about it, it kinda gets in the way, and I end up treating the OS itself as an application, rather than a platform upon which to run applications.

Windows 7 is new and exciting. It is viewed by many to be the saviour of a large company in the US Pacific Northwest, and fixes many problems owned by it’s predecessor.  As “new and exciting” it is, after a little use, it just becomes “more of the same”. Outside of a few new features, there really isn’t that much exciting after all, and it does what it does well. It can get out of the way, and simply play a supporting role, once you get past the newness.

Leopard, ironically, is the one I end up booting into. I spent most of yesterday in Fedora because of an online “class” being held in IRC involving KVM and libvirtd, but for the most part, since getting a working “Hackintosh’ system going, it’s where I’ve been “living” most of the time. What I’ve noticed about Leopard is that once you get it set up, it just does it’s thing, and you forget that you are running a “OS” and you focus on running your “Applications”, which is what an OS is supposed to do.

The point of this post – it goes back to Linux (as do most of my posts). Historically, Linux has tried to compete with Windows, and win over Windows users. I think this is the biggest mistake. I think Linux should strive to be more in the vein of what the Mac OS can do – run applications, and get out of the way. The first part is the hardest – we need to get “familiar” applications in Linux first. There is a lot shared under the hood between the two OSes (UNIX roots and all), and I don’t think this will be hard to achieve.

Do you agree? Post your comments below.

I really have no practical use for this, but it sure was fun to set up and get to work

I think I have achieved “Computing Nirvana” (if such a thing could possibly exist)!

I’ve redone my Hackintosh install, and I’ve set up what is the ultimate triple boot system. I’ve done it in a slightly non-traditional manner, but have removed many of the annoyances I’ve always had with a multi-boot system.

First, I’m not using any “special” bootloaders, nor am I having multiple OSes boot from any single bootloader. What I’ve done is capitalized on the fact that my system has three hard drives, and as a result, I can have three separate bootloaders, and I can utilize “F12″ at boot-up to select an alternate boot device.

I’ve got Fedora 11 (Preview/Snapshot) booting from the 10K VelociRaptor, and is also my “default” boot which I get if I don’t select “F12″ to choose something different. I’ve also created 40GB partitions as the first partition on my other two drives. One drive has a MacOS “Hackintosh” install, and the other has a Windows 7 install. I formatted the “rest” of those two drives as ext4, as they are used as mount-points in Fedora, which will be my primary OS. I can utilize my handy little WD Passport external HDD if I need to transfer data between the seperate installs, so it’s my wildcard storage space, and will hold data I may need regardless of what OS I’ve booted into. I also have a old 80GB SATA drive that is in an eSATA enclosure that I can use to install some “random” distro I’d like to try as a native install rather than in a virtual machine.

So, how will I utilize my three operating systems?

Fedora will be my main, primary OS. It’s what I will be booting into most of the time, and I will also utilize KVM for virtualization when I don’t “need” a native Windows install.

I will use the MacOS hackintosh drive as a “boredom killer” and for when I want to see how something might work under OS X. I also have VMware Fusion installed under OS X and I should (haven’t tested yet) be able to boot up my other two primary OSes virtualized while booted natively in OS X should I need/want too. I also will have a small, streamlined XP image in Fusion for running a few things.

I will use the Windows 7 native install for gaming, and probably nothing more. It will be migrated to Win7 final once released.

This should give me a lot of flexibility, and will satisfy any “itch” I might get to try something without being “destructive”.

I don’t really know much about Benchmarking a Mac, but I did find a few Mac compatible benchmarks, and I decided to give them a run…

First, the obligatory “About this Mac” shot:

And the first page of System Profiler:

Now, for some actual benchmarks.

I’d heard of Xbench, so I gave that a spin, even though it seemed kinda “old” judging from the release date. I’m thinking perhaps this isn’t maintained any longer, so I wonder if people still use it for a Macintosh benchmark, but here are my results anyway:

And Geekbench (64-bit):

If anyone has run any of the above on their own Hackintosh systems (or “real” Macs), I’d love to know your specs and scores. Also, I’d love it if you could recommend other good benchmarks as well.

…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”)