scott.hodson.blog

I’ve seen the several announcements about people getting OS X to work on their x86 boxes and thought I’d try it out. I ran into some of the problems others have had but then got around them. I post this for those trying to do the same thing and having some of the same problems I was running into.

My main reference is this post from the UneasySilence website.

For your reference, my hardware is

1GB RAM
P4 3.0E socket 478, Prescott core, 800 FSB
ATI Radeon 9600 128MB video
DVD-RW attached
80 GB HDD, with 3 partitions (Mac, Linux, Windows), all blank
OS X is on the first partition

First of all, let me say I’m not very expert with Linux nor OS X. I’ve put together from scratch 2 PCS and have maintained my own hardware and occassinally fixed other people’s hardware for 10-15 years now so I’m pretty decent at hardware stuff but primarily on Windows. Also, I’m primarily a .NET/Java/database programmer and don’t deal with hardware at this level too often.

Secondly, I didn’t try to install from Windows, I did it the way originally described in the original post, using an Ubuntu Live CD and the OS X image on a separate USB hard drive. I got the OS X image from the .torrent as hinted at from the UneasySilence website. The downloaded file is a .bz2 file, about 1.28GB, but once unpacked it’s about 6GB. I had to download some special program for Windows that could unpack a .bz2 file, my WinZip didn’t know how to handle it. I don’t remeber the program, Google “bz2 windows”.

When I booted Ubuntu Live with the USB drive (an old 20GB HDD in my hard drive enclosure) it showed up in Ubuntu as “/media/usbdisk” and not under /dev as originally described.

It took me a while to get the “dd” step to work. From Ubuntu, make sure you use the “Root Terminal” application and not “Terminal” to ensure you have root privileges. I kept trying /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 and it wouldn’t let me. I then realized my HDD was at /dev/hdc so that finally worked. Again, I’m not very knowledgable in Linux so forgive my naivety here. Some have reported using hda, hdb, but hdc worked for me. Do an “ls /dev/hd*” to see all of the hd devices you have and you can naively try each one. If one you choose takes several minutes of waiting then it’s probably working for you, otherwise you will get an error almost immediately about access or not enough disk space.

Then when I boot OS X it froze and said something like it couldn’t find the primary drive. I remember something about primary and secondary IDE slots on motherboards. So I had to make sure my slave/master/cable select setting were right and the boot hard drive ribbon had to be attached to the primary IDE slot. My mobo has 2 IDE slots, the one closest to the front of the edge of the mobo is the primary IDE slot. Once I got my HDD’s ribbon plugged into that one I progressed.

Then when OS X booted, it froze like described during the boot up with the Apple logo and eventual a “no smoking” logo appearing after a few minutes. So I booted with the -x option as described. Then I got the “deadmoo” login screen, but my keyboard and mouse weren’t working. Turns out OS X wouldn’t recognize my PS/2 keyboard and mouse coming off of my KVM switch, so I had to attach USB keyboard and mouse. Now I could try to login.

My next problem was when I tried to boot “-s” to change the password it says I can’t because it’s running on read-only mode. Then when I boot in “-v” mode and it freezes at “VGA: vram [d8000000:00000000}” as other people have reported. I read through the Uneasy Silence original post’s comments and someone had mentioned that the “deadmoo” password is “bovinity”. I tried that and voila! It logged me into OS X!

I haven’t played with running any apps yet. Others have reported problems getting sound and network adapters to work, and I haven’t found anybody successfully running Rosetta on x86 yet. Many have reported that OS X on Intel is blazingly fast, but without Rosetta the only apps you can run are the ones that come with the OS X install until you get Rosetta to work. So until then you get to run Safari and iChat wickedly fast…yay.

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