Hackintoshes have always seemed like way more effort than they’re worth to me. Custom kernels, problematic updates, random crashes, it all flies in the face of why you use an Apple operating system (and computer) in the first place. While I can appreciate the hacker aesthetic, I’ve never really had the inclination or patience to try it for myself – until now.
Dan‘s been running Mac OS X on his Dell for a couple of years with some success, but it was hearing him talk about Snow Leopard and how well that works pretty much out-of-the-box, including updates from Apple, that made me rethink my position. Fast forward a couple of weeks and here I am in front of my own PC which now runs an (almost) flawless installation of Cupertino’s finest operating system. The installation was laughably straightforward, but I’ve outlined it below just for shits and giggles all the same:
Hardware
- Intel E6600 2.4GHz Core2Duo Processor
- Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi mainboard. SATA configured as AHCI in BIOS, no other changes of note.
- 4GB DDR2
- EVGA GTX260-216 896MB VGA
- 250GB Seagate HDD connected to SATA5
Installation was made with Empire EFI v1.085. I almost gave up at the first hurdle I wasn’t able to boot from my SATA DVD drive as it echoed some random EBIOS error, to which anecdotal evidence on various forums suggested dodgy media. I was using a disc which I knew to work so this wasn’t the problem in my case, and in the end I made an OS X USB boot disk by following some instructions out there on the Interwebs, and then booted the installation from that. The only thing of note here was that I had to add the flags ‘GraphicsEnabler=Y PciRoot=0′ in order to get graphics to work, as my nVidia 260-based card relies on that injector for compatibility.
Anyway, the 250GB disk was dedicated to OS X and so partitioned accordingly during install. The remainder of the process went smoothly, and after rebooting OS X came up pretty much as clean as a whistle. All that was then left was to run myHack (on the Empire EFI CD for convenience!) which installs the ‘standard’ set of compatibility kexts as well as the Chameleon EFI bootloader onto your disk along with a really fucking ugly set of boot screens. Everything was working from this point except for wireless and my NIC, the latter of which was easily fixed by a simple modification to one of the Apple kexts for MarvellYukon devices. Incidentally, the wifi I don’t actually care for as my machine runs into a GbE switch that also has a wireless bridge attached, and so at this point I was happy.
The final litmus test for me was to install 10.6.2 via SU (as well as the recent security updates), migrate everything from my MacBook, and then sit back in amazement as it all worked flawlessly. So now I have a solid, fully functional install of SL on my PC. As I’m sat in front of an Apple LCD and using an Apple keyboard, as long as you don’t look under the desk who is to know that it’s not really a Mac Pro!? :)
The only thing that’s broken at this point is sleep mode, but as that’s something I’d never use on my workstation I’m disinclined to spend time hacking around with it any more. To be fair the installation does seem very fragile and prone to basic errors, such as if the permissions are out of whack on any of your kexts it simply won’t boot with no clear indication as to what the root cause is, and quite often recovery can take a little while so it’s really more hassle than it’s worth. In practice it’s extremely solid with everything working at full speed (including graphics and I/O) and it seems super snappy overall. I don’t have to worry about updates or it breaking on a whim and so that’ll do me.
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Thanks – useful to know how it went for you. I like the sound of Empire-EFI, but I’m tempted to wait a few weeks until other people have solved all the problems with it!