Nerdy stuff: the “Hackintosh”
Inspired by the hackintosh adventures of my high school buddy, Ted, I decided this week to make another attempt at setting up one of my own. A hackintosh is a plain vanilla PC running Apple’s Mac OS X. With the right hardware and software, this can reportedly be pretty easy to set up. Mine was a little more challenging because of the older hardware I’m working with: an IBM ThinkPad T40, Type 2373-14U.
The hardware in this machine is as follows:
- Intel Pentium M CPU, 1.3 GHz
- 1.25GB RAM
- 30GB Hard drive (a spare for testing purposes)
- Intel Chipset and Intel Pro/100VE Ethernet
- Atheros wi-fi
- AC97 Audio
- ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video
For my initial install, I used a DVD I already had lying around the house from a previous attempt, a distribution of Mac OS X 10.5.2 called Kalyway. Although I was able to install and boot the system, I had several problems. It ran slowly on my hardware, my wi-fi card didn’t work, and I didn’t have a battery gauge when I unplugged the laptop. During some further reading on the OSX86Project’s wiki, the InsanelyMac forum, and on a forum for IBM ThinkPad users running Mac OS X, I heard about an updated distribution of Mac OS X 10.5.5, called iDeneb.
I found iDeneb much more functional, with some caveats I’ll mention below. First, here are the installation options that worked for me. I partitioned my hard drive, selecting “1 Partition” and the filesystem type “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. Click the Options button and select the “Master Boot Record” partition table. Apply the changes, then quit Disk Utility and proceed with the install.
When you see a “Customize” button, click that and choose the following options:
- Audio: AC97Audio
- Chipset: ICHx Fixed
- Kernel: StageXNU
- Network, Ethernet: Intel100
- Network, Wireless: Atheros
- Fixes: ACPI-Fix, PowerManagement
- Video: AgpGart
- Applications: OSx86Tools (Optional)
This configuration resulted in a working system for me. I can connect to the Internet via wi-fi, see an accurate battery gauge in my menu bar, browse the web, chat with friends, and so on. In fact, I’m writing this post with Firefox under Mac OS X on the ThinkPad right now.
A number of things don’t work quite right, however–several of which I wouldn’t have expected. Most of the included applications and utilities work. iCal crashes when I attempt to launch it, which surprised me, but wasn’t a deal breaker. I haven’t tried the iLife software, but I suspect those applications would have issues. Both MacPorts and the Subversion revision control system failed to work correctly. MacPorts setup uses rsync to update its list of available software, and rsync crashes while syncing the ports tree. Subversion complained of a problem with the format files in my repository and refused to check out my documents. A friend of mine theorized that these programs were compiled for an SSE3-capable processor; the Pentium M only supports the SSE2 instruction set, and this may be the root of the malfunction.
Unfortunately, these problems will keep me from really enjoying the hackbook, as I began to call it. For me, the whole point of having a Mac is to have a mostly trouble-free computing experience. I’ve previously owned a 12″ G4 PowerBook and still have a G4 PowerMac. Although the PowerMac is getting a bit long in the tooth now, they were and are the most reliable and usable combination of hardware and software I’ve ever had. If you want to use Mac OS X, you’re still probably better off buying a Mac and if I could afford a new one, I would do exactly that. This was a fun experiment though, and I’ve enjoyed the novelty of seeing and using Mac OS X on my ThinkPad. For this geek, on this hardware, I’ll be going back to Linux or BSD.
