Mac OS X running on regular PCs

[Babe RuthLess]

This is probably old news for most of you, but the nice folks at the OSx86 Project have cracked the Intel development version of Apple's Mac OS X 'Tiger' (10.4) so that it now runs on most recent PCs. They even claim that you can now build your own Mac for $199 (US).

Of course, running a copy of 'Intel Tiger' on your PC involves a certain amount of hacking and is many instances illegal - you need to download a (pirate) copy of the Devel kit from one of the torrent sites, and the installation on non-Apple development kit is itself a violation of the user agreement, among other things. Still, it's nice to know you can now own a Mac for $199 plus a few minutes' hacking, especially given Apple's current hardware prices.

(To make one thing absolutely clear, I do not support or condone software piracy of any kind)

I know diehard Apple fans may argue that the Mac experience includes a lot more than the OS alone, it's also about the design of the things etc. etc. I must also admit I was thinking about buying a Mac Mini, but news that it'll be the first Intel-powered Mac by April 2006 had already convinced me to wait a little longer... and then this.

Folks with the most recent P4's, Celerons and Athlons won't need to do much besides a few basic Unix hacks that are thoroughly described in the OSx86 Project page, but those (like me) with older gear will need to employ a few more tricks to get OS X going.

Otherwise the experience seems to be the same as in a Mac, possibly a lot faster than what you get when running a Mini with 256MB of RAM. I called some fellow journalists who write about technology and one of them was running OS X on his home PC. He told me there are now some dual-boot machines popping up and that this was his next move. He hadn't tried it yet for fear of breaking his precious PC/Mac thing.

I'm a bit of an Open-source software activist and use Linux almost exclusively, but having the functionality of the Mac OS with a cheaper, more flexible machine is indeed a very appealing idea. If only I could find a legitimate way to install OS X...

[Josh_PoloGTi]

Your MoBo arrived this morning and will be posted this afternoon.



I might give this a try! Will it work on an Athlon XP2500?

[13twelve]

its also rumoured to be a fake

i read somewhere about apple releasing this OSx86 Project to try and get the hacker sorts who would try and do this, out the woodwork to bone them

[david burton]

interesting read

but I have just noticed your sig - hahhaha that is the best sig I have seen in a while! I'm going to send it to my workmates - we're all programmers....

[PhilGTi]

Would be f*****g fabulous if it was true...

[Babe RuthLess]

I'm not sure about this being a fake, there's plenty of screenshots available and they don't look like fabrications (to my eyes at least).

And I've spoken to at least one person who says he's got it to work (haven't seen the actual machine tho).

In any case, I'll give it a try in the next few weeks (when I get all the parts for my new Pentium box from eBay! ) and report my finds back here.


@Josh

It should work but Rosetta (the PPC translation layer) will not run, so you'll need Intel-native software to run on your "Mac". Rosetta requires newer processors with the SSE3 instruction set.

Also, I believe some graphics, sound and network cards might not work right away - they'll require some patching.

It's all a bit of a hack at the moment. Interesting weekend project nonetheless.

[Tahrey1043]

should think it's quite doable, unix and its programs are supposed from the ground up to be portable to any processor (that has the power and feature set to support it, anyway - dont think we'll be seeing Z80, 6502 or 80286 linux too soon)

thing is you either have to get the source or decompile it somehow. nice trick if you can manage it.

which is why i'm a bit skeptical... getting the OS to load in some form probably isnt difficult for an accomplished code jockey but then you have to think about all the programs you want to run on it ... you need x86 versions of itune, photoshop, and so on, as well as either x86 ports of the mac editions of word and explorer/firefox, or native versions tweaked to work with the OS.

PS it's news to me at the very least, so dont worry
PPS i thought the powerPC chips were supposed to be faster than what intel puts out? and is the OS really so hungry that the chip advantage would be lost by having "only" 256mb?

[13twelve]

the metafilter thread from a bit ago on this topic:

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/44211

[Babe RuthLess]

thing is you either have to get the source or decompile it somehow. nice trick if you can manage it.

OS X is based on Darwin, an open-source Unix clone. As for re-compiling, there's no need to do that now that Apple has released the Devel Kit which is a full version of OS X 'Tiger' compiled for Pentium-class processors.

which is why i'm a bit skeptical... getting the OS to load in some form probably isnt difficult for an accomplished code jockey but then you have to think about all the programs you want to run on it ... you need x86 versions of itune, photoshop, and so on, as well as either x86 ports of the mac editions of word and explorer/firefox, or native versions tweaked to work with the OS.

That's where Rosetta comes in. Rosetta is a full component of OS X for Intel, an application that dynamically translates PPC-compiled binaries into Intel "language". So there, you can run any PPC app in real-time and without having to launch an emulation session or shell. Good ol' Steve has said the process is competely transparent to the user and that seems to be case.

Problem is, Rosetta currently only works with processors that have Intel's SSE3 instructions (those from the HT Pentium onwards). On older machines, there's no Rosetta so yes, you'll need Intel-native Mac apps.

There have been rumours about Rosetta being cracked, but that's unconfirmed I'm afraid.

i thought the powerPC chips were supposed to be faster than what intel puts out? and is the OS really so hungry that the chip advantage would be lost by having "only" 256mb?

OS X is so memory-hungry that Apple upgraded all Mac Minis to come with at least 512Mb RAM. I wouldn't run OS X in anything less than that (too slow and "choppy").

As for PPC being faster than Intel, that's probably true clock-speed for clock-speed, but in cost terms the PowerPCs that Apple used were not good bussiness for neither IBM nor Apple itself.

PPCs use an inherently more elegant approach to processing and are still widely used in other applications (including IBM mainframes) albeit in different forms. They're also powering the next generation of video game consoles.

[Tahrey1043]

RISC chips, right....?

Good for dedicated causes with good programmers but not so great for a multi-use multi-tasking platform where anyone with a cheap assembler, C++ or visual basic can come along and have a pop

that real-time translation (dynamic recompilation? emulation? whaddya want to call it?) sounds pretty funky though! I wonder how it works ... and how fast it is? Emulation usually takes an enormous speed hit unless the processors are quite similar ... hence you can emulate a macintosh on an atari or amiga with almost transparent speed - they all use 68000s - and vice versa, and a spectrum on a 286 as its got heritage to a chip similar to the Z80... but i bet atari/amiga/megadrive emulation is slower on an early PPC compared to the 68040s it replaced, just as it's horrendous on anything less than a 100mhz pentium (for a 8mhz virtual machine!)... i wonder if macs have trouble emulating speccies?

seeing comparison of how fast apps run natively on PPCs at a certain speed with a P4 HT that may be several times quicker in terms of Mhz using rosetta would be interesting.

If they plan to sell this, by the way, what are the legal implications considering they worked from an open source original - presumably under the GNU license, which IIRC bans charging for the sale of the software or derivatives over and above the media its burned on, shipping, and maybe a very modest fee for the time duplication took? I heard they charge about $100 for OSX...
(then again, redhat and several others sell linuxes at well above the dupe & distro costs ... but, at the same time, they remain free to download)