OSX using Two x86 PC's and an iPod

A few days ago I finally managed to install OSX86 on my laptop. Using two computers, Even's old iPod and a lot of time!

It all started when I suddenly and mysteriously found myself holding a Mac OS X 10.4 Generic Install DVD in my hands. I've wanted to play with OSX for quite some time, so I removed my XP and Vista partitions and went to work. It proved to be a long installation process, but also quite interesting.

It all seemed so well when I booted the install DVD and the famous Apple glowed on my screen. However, when I was to select the installation drive I could not find any drives. Having seen this before I fired up Disk Utility and tried to create a new HFS+ partition in the free space on my hard drive... But nothing happened, seems like the installer want's to repartition my entire drive from scratch in order to work properly, this definitely was not an option, since I'm quite happy with my Gentoo installation!

Anyways I booted Gentoo and used fdisk to create a new HFS+ (Hex code AF) partition on my free space. Then I once more loaded the install DVD and this time I could format the new partition using Disk Utility without any problem. OSX, however, refused to install. And the only error message I got was: "Mac OS X cannot start from this partition.". I could mount the partition though...

At this moment I was quite pissed off, but then I remembered my good old USB drive. So I plugged it in, nothing happened.. After hitting and shaking (seriously, it worked!) the drive it finally woke up, and I could partition and format it using Disk Utility. Haha, I thought, going back to the OSX installation. But what happened? Did it install? NOOOOO! Seemed the disk was 400MB short of the limit. This was very annoying since you can customize OSX to take much less space than what is required for a full install, in the next step of the installation... WHY???

Now I was on the brink of giving up, when Even mentioned that he had an ancient first generation iPod that I could use as a firewire disk. This would have worked fine, if it haven't been for two factors: 1) The battery of the iPod is broken and only lasts about five minutes and 2) The firewire port on my laptop doesn't provide any power. We tried of course, but only got to about 20% of the total installation.

It was then Even got the brilliant idea of creating a firewire chain using a second PC. Luckily we had a PC with two firewire ports available, and using this PC we managed to connect the iPod to one port (providing power) and then connect my laptop to the other firewire port. This worked and the iPod popped up automagically on my laptop. I formatted the iPod as Journaled HFS+ and happily clicked the install button!

Then the moment of truth was upon us as I booted the computer. Carefully I added "Removable Device" to the boot sequence in my BIOS and then we waited.... NOTHING! Naturally my laptop did not support booting from firewire drives... After trying to get grub to load my firewire drive I finally gave up and looked for another solution, then I remembered the unused HFS+ partition on my hard drive. So I mounted this partition in Gentoo along with the iPod and tried to copy everything over using
cp -rp /mnt/ipod /mnt/osx

This was naturally quite naive, since this only copies the contents of the disk and not the boot sector. I had to try it though, beeing lazy ;). The solution was to do a raw copy of the iPod using the dd utility:
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/hda3 bs=512

Then I set up grub to chain load the new OSX partition, /dev/hda3 and booted. The joy was great when the Apple logo appeared without the DVD! But what is this? A nasty yellow screen telling me to boot my new Intel Wannabe Mac?? Seemed the ATI drivers for OSX86 caused this error, so I had to load OSX in single mode using the -s switch and then remove all of the ATI kernel extensions from /System/Library/Extensions. After remounting my drive using mount -uw /, since single mode mounts the drives as read-only by default.

Once more, boot, and voila! There I had a nice OS X :) I was impressed at the speed of the OS, everything except Dashboard was snappy. My ATI Radeon 9600 is identified as a VESA2.0 compliant card so I cannot use Quartz Extreme or Core Image, but this didn't really diminish the overall experience of the OS. It was impressive that OSX boots faster on my PC than the 12" PowerBook belonging to Even.

The default resolution for my desktop was locked to 1024x768x32 by default, but adding the following line to my /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist file got me the native 1400x1050 resolution:

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1400x1050x32</string>
<key>Quiet Boot</key>
<string>Yes</string>

Note the latter key/string pair enables OSX to boot faster, by avoiding the startup countdown and prompt.

In order to get sound working with my on board Intel AC97 card, I had to download Darwin X86 8.01 and copy the AppleAC97Audio.kext directory to my /System/Library/Extensions directory, then it worked fine without any modifications.

I didn't get my Intel Wireless Ethernet to work, but cabled networking worked without hassle. The same goes for Bluetooth, using a generic Bluetooth USB dongle. Battery status, Speedstep, and hard drive sleep mode also seems to be working, but the OS itself won't go into sleep mode. Dual monitors also doesn't work without proper ATI drivers.

The following applications worked:

• OmniGraffle 4.1 (PPC)
• OpenOffice.org (PPC)
• Audium X (PPC)
• Gimp (PPC/X86)
• XBench (PPC)
• Microsoft Office 2004 (PPC)
• iTunes (PPC)
• Firefox (PPC)

These, however, didn't work:

• Proteus (PPC)
• iChat video chat crashes after five seconds (X86?)
• Java apps using SWT such as Eclipse and Azureus

My laptop specifications are:

Tundra 1557 (Customized AOpen Barebook)
1400x1050 SXGA+ LCD
Intel Pentium-M 1.4 GHz , Centrino, SSE2
1024 MB DDR SODIMM
40 GB HDD
ATI Radeon Mobility 9600, 64MB RAM
QSI CD-RW/DVD
USB2/Firewire
Generic USB Bluetooth Dongle

All in all this was an interesting project, won't be using OS X for anything more but it was interesting to check it out. Now.. Back to Linux :)

By the way, here are some nice links for installing Mac OS X on a generic PC:

• OSx86Project
• Various Patches by Maxxuss
• OSx86 Forum