The Hackintosh Project (osx86)
In which I chronicle the installation of Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a Dell.
I purchased a Dell Dimension 3000 Pentium 4 (3GHz prescott) system in April 2005 for $379 after rebate. It came with a 17″ LCD and a printer, and I couldn’t pass up a good deal. I figured it was cheap, and I might need a Windows box for something one day. Apparently linux is sufficient for my needs, because it ended up pretty much unused and exiled to the corner of my office until today.
Which is the day I installed OS X on it.
Running a hacked up version of OS X is sort of a legal gray area for me. Technically I own a copy of OS X for Intel which came with my mac mini, which now runs linux, so it seems I ought to have an extra license to use however I see fit. The law of course, might not exactly work that way. Anyways, I got a copy of a JaS 10.4.8 Os X iso and started chugging away.
I have a bit of a disclaimer to put forth here. I’m no hackintosh guru. I’m a linux guy, and I just went into this thing gung ho with some googlefu and irc. The main places for discussion on this are on the forums at insanelymac, the wiki at osx86project.org or chatting with the guys at #JaS.dvd or #osx86 on irc.macspeak.net. The following is probably the wrong way of doing this, but it’s the way that worked for me.
After multiple failed installs, I figured out I had to burn the iso at 1.0x, as for some reason, it’s a bit finicky otherwise. I installed about 6 times, booting my system in verbose mode (hit f8 then type -v on boot). I kept getting a failure loading the com.apple.family.IOStorage kext. It took me that many tries to figure out you have to customize the install in order to get a successful boot. If you click the customize button when installing, there’s a whole “JaS” section.
I selected the semethex kernel, since it’s safe, and some other fixes, and eventually got my system to boot. From reading the HCL on the wiki, I knew the 865G integrated video wouldn’t work with Quartz Express and Core Image acceleration, so I had purchased a PCI nvidia 5500fx card with 256 megs of ram for about $50 on ebay. This motherboard didn’t have any agp or pci-e slots, or else I would have gone for something nicer. A recent development of macvidia drivers, has allowed almost all nvidia cards to work with full accelleration in osx86! It’s a kernel extension called Titan.kext, and it does the bios’ job of initializing the video cards the way they want.
Installing Titan
To install titan, I downloaded the kext from omni’s blog, and unzipped it onto my Desktop. Then I opened up a terminal and did the following:
sudo -s
mv ~/Desktop/Titan.kext /System/Library/Extensions
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext
chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext
rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
reboot
Then the machine rebooted into the glory of a fully accelerated high resolution desktop. To check if graphics acceleration was working, I simply opened a terminal and typed:
system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType
which spat out:
Graphics/Displays:
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500:
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500
Type: Display
Bus: PCI
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0326
Revision ID: 0x00a1
Displays:
DELL 2405FPW:
Resolution: 1920 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
Depth: 32-bit Color
Core Image: Supported
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Supported
Display:
Status: No display connected
(emphasis mine)
Showing Core Image and Quartz Extreme as functioning.
The key thing to get usb working on this device, was to download the USB Developer Kit for 10.4.8 and then install it. You mount the dmg and somewhere along the line you find a driver that doesn’t have “log” in it and install it. After that I could use my usb m-audio transit as well as an usb dvd+/-r.
Looking at the devices I had in my computer, I took inventory to see what I would have to get working. Network: check, video: check, usb: check, sound: check. Pretty much ready to go.