“Hackintosh”

ok. ok. ok!!

I was tempted after my last post.  I know it’s evil.  It’s almost like writing a program to suggest scrabble solutions based on the current board and my tiles (yes – i’ve done that too: really clever use of hashes to speed up anagram matches, even if I do so say so myself!).  

So anyway, I got myself a retail version of Leopard Server, sorted out some spare hardware (generic Gigabyte board, big hard drive, bluetooth kb & mouse and nothing else).  I used an EFI emulator and the whole thing just worked. Well …. kind of.  I had to grab some drivers off the ‘net for my audio, network card and chipset.  I’m also having troubles getting iCal server to function.  But I suspect the latter is because i bust something in the Server setup (migrated from standard to advanced, because I thought ‘why not’).  It may be because my network card does not have an Apple mac address though, as the error I get (typically non-descriptive) talks about not being able to get the mac address of my NIC.  Why it needs the mac address I don’t know: hasn’t the calserver heard of TCP/IP, or (m)DNS?

Anyway – the point of the story is to underline that you can do this. Easily. Software update works out of the box. Power management works too.

But, this is a breach of Apple’s licence terms, and I am a software lawyer.  So, curiosity satisfied; and having proved to myself that it can be done, and easily so; i’m overwriting the installation with a clean Ubuntu 64bit server alternative. I head that Apple may be allowing Leopard Server to run in a VM – i may investigate that and ingest my current instance into a VM.

And, no: I’m not going to provide links, tutorials, explanations or other help about how I got the Hackintosh up and running.  It took me a couple of days (evenings) to work out what Apple was doing during the boot and installation process. Once I fathomed this, the rest was more straightforward.