OS X on an Intel Box - My Story
Published March 18th, 2006 in Apple, Internet, Noteworthy, PC, Software, Technology
I have been playing around with various Bittorrent clients on my Mac mini and I just happened to cross an OS X x86 installation. So it completed the full download this morning as an ISO file. Since my mac mini doesn’t have a SuperDrive I couldn’t burn the iso directly. I tried to put it onto an external Firewire drive I had but that FAT32 formatted so it can’t accept the ISO (as the file is bigger than 2GB). So I used StuffIt to compress the ISO and break it into parts, which was then re-assembled in Windows. In Windows Nero was used to burn the ISO (took around 15 mins) onto a blank DVD-R. I used Partition Magic to clean the drive (separate drive than Windows, an old 10GB drive) that I wanted to install OS X onto. I then used the DVD to boot up, and partioned the drive for HFS+ (Journalised) so that OS X can be installed. It took roughly 40mins to install the whole OS with hacks. I was surprised at how fast it was.
After all the installation and configuring I started up OS X for the first time. It booted up without any problems, and I saw the desktop on an Intel machine for the very first time. There are minor problems/glitches. All the parts in the Sony PC that I tested it out on is recognised, apart from the D-Link PCI Wi-Fi card I have in it. This means that there is no internet! How annoying! I spent a long time trying to get it to work but nada. So I posted a topic on the OSX86.org forums and I hope someone could help me. The other ‘problem’ is a visual artefact on the screen, sometimes a part of the screen shows something that has moved or was there before. This can be fixed by moving a window or something over it, but it is annoying. Apparently it is a reported error that numerous people are having (I don’t think it’s my graphics card, an AGP ATI Radeon 9600XT as it is working fine) so I’m not sure. Anyway the whole system is pretty fast, all the universal apps and the dashboard start up nearly instantly. Read on for specs of the system and image(s).
Below are the specs for the system and an image of the desktop.
- 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading (OS X recognises it as 2 CPU’s !)
- ATI Radeon 9600XT - Working
- Firewire 400 - Working
- USB 2 - Working
- Dlink Wireless - DWL G520+ - Not working
- Sony DVD Burner - Recognised and working
- 1GB RAM (2 X 512MB SDRAM)
- Digital (S-PDIF) out as well as analog out - Working
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Really cool stuff. I was wanting to do this on my Windows machine, and especially since I have two hard drives. Could you possibly tell me how you got it setup, especially on how you setup dual-booting and startup disks. Thanks.
One thing I didn’t mention, was the fact that because I was using 2 hard drives, I didn’t use anything in particular to be able to dual boot. This unfortunately means that if I want to boot into OS X then I have to change the drive boot order in my PC’s BIOS. But when I can actually bother, I will add an option to boot OS X into the Boot file on Windows XP or I will use Partition Magic to allow the drive to boot. I was in such a hurry to install OS X that I didn’t think much about the booting part (as it was another drive).
What I did was clean the drive blank and format it as FAT32 in Partition Magic. I then booted into the OS X DVD and used Disk Utility to format the whole drive to HFS (Mac OS Journaled). I then selected the partition (named APPLE) to install OS X onto.
It seems your wireless network issues should be sorted
out in osx 10.4.5
D-Link DWL-G520 (PCI) Atheros Chip Recognised as AirPort Extreme (HW vA1 or vB3) ONLY
You may have to update the firmware on the wireless
network card to one of the firmwares listed above.
The G520+(plus) is different from the G520 that you mentioned, I think. I’ll give that a try though!