What A Fucking Waste Of Time

I’ve been tweaking OS X Tiger to work better with my x86 hardware. The first thing I did was configure GRUB on the primary drive to dual boot between Debian Linux and Tiger. It’s a lot easier to switch between OSes now, obviously.

I’ve managed to increase the display resolution from 1024×768 to 1280×1024. The main display is sharp and gorgeous, however, it still dithers screenshots and the DVD Player doesn’t recognize a video device. Also, I haven’t been able to get sound to work, and USB flash drives act oddly. If I plug a flash drive in after boot up, it mounts and works perfectly. However, if I boot up with a flash drive connected, the drive is not mounted and won’t mount even if I disconnect it then plug it back in.

So, there are some issues with this version of OS X for the x86 platform, but Apple has done a good job… and I’m sure it will be a lot more stable on official Apple x86 hardware.

More screenshots (each > 1.5 MB): Shot 2 | Shot 3 | Shot 4 | Shot 5 | Shot 6 … and finally, this blog entry was created completely using the Macinto… uhh… OSx86 system. How’s that for a sexy and elegant name? Maybe I should call it Marklar. Sounds better than OSx86 system, don’t ya think?

I decided to yank the hard drives from my Debian Linux system (which runs on an Asus A8V motherboard with an AMD64 3000+ CPU and 512MB of PC3200 RAM) and try installing OS X "Tiger" for x86 on it.

Installation was flawless again. However, when I rebooted after installation, the system threw up a kernel panic message. So, I rebooted the computer. Same thing; kernel panic. Uh oh.

Did some quick Googling and found I had installed the SSE2 patches when the AMD64 system is SSE3. D’oh! The SSE2 patch and other Maxxuss patches were added to the DVD ISO (not by Apple) so the OS can be installed on a wider variety of x86 platforms. So, I reinstalled again, this time omitting the patches.

After rebooting, I still had the "must reboot" kernel panic problem. Again, I searched Google. This time I found that two extensions in the System folder (CHUDUtils.kext and CHUDProf.kext) were causing the problem for another developer. I booted into safe mode with the -x option at the boot loader, logged in, removed the extensions, and rebooted.

Success! Tiger booted up perfectly on the AMD64 system! I chalk these "problems" up to the ISO I was installing from. It was, shall we say, "modified" from it’s original form. Hack patches would not have played a factor with a factory DVD disc. Add to that I’ve never installed OS X before — I had no instructions to read before hand — and I would say the install was amazingly smooth!

Three words: Oh my fucking God! I can’t believe it worked… and it was so flawless!

Another Screenshot

I downloaded a 4 GB DVD ISO torrent from the Internet which contained OS X “Tiger” 10.4.1 for Intel processors. I burned the image to a DVD and decided to see if it would boot. To my surprise, it did! I dug around the computer room (c’mon, all geeks have computer shit lying about) and found a 15 GB hard drive I pulled from my (hacked) TiVo. I disconnected the Windows Server 2003 hard drive and plugged in the salvaged TiVo drive and booted up my new Tiger x86 DVD.

I’m telling ya… I was never so excited to see an operation system install than I was watching Tiger install on my 2.66 GHz Pentium 4. Things were going smoothly, but I kept waiting for the install to fail. I mean, I was installing software designed for Macintosh computers onto a platform designed for Windows. Microsoft has a hard enough time doing this… how good can Apple be at it? Hell, my sphincter is still sore from “Windows Me.” But, everything worked perfectly, and the installer completed successfully. I’ve had more troubles installing various Windows versions on Intel hardware than I did installing Tiger. I finally see why the new Macs are so stable.

My only bitch was it kept telling me “Less than a minute remaining” under the progress bar. In typical progress bar fashion, that “less than a minute” ended up being close to 5 minutes. All progress bars in all operating systems have this issue, so I can’t call it a “problem.”

So, here I am, making a blog entry (with my Linux laptop), and adding these cool screenshots of my “Macintosh” desktop so my Mac friends can get pissed that I didn’t spend $2000 on Mac hardware.

Pentium 4 computer with 512 MB of RAM: $350.
Salvaged 15 GB hard drive: $0.
OS X Tiger 10.4 for Intel processors: $0.
Having a “free” Mac: Priceless