philippe::niquille | regular niche market thoughts

I almost “had to”? participate at the OSx86 movement, it sounded to cool to be true! I had enough of just getting the “fake look and feel”?, see previous posts ;-).

When you run OSX in VMWare or PearPC the emulation process slows it down really hard and leaves it as “unusable”?. So far so good. Now installing it natively on an x86 with relatively new hardware components is incomparable – you get full speed and the real Aqua eye candy.
I tested OS X Tiger (10.4.2) on my Dell d410 Laptop, which turned out to be a good hardware choice because of integrated Intel 915 graphics and SSE2 Pentium M processor. The original developer version of OS X is meant to run on Pentium 4 (SSE3) processors with Intel mainboards. The “SSE”? can be understood as the “processor language”? and so the developer version has to be patched with an SSE2->SSE3 emulator which slows things down a little. But I can assure you, OS X fires like a rocket on my 1.86 Mhz/1GB Ram system.
Now the big question: Do PowerPC compiled applications run on the x86 version? Yes, they do! The developer version includes an engine called Rosetta, which on one side checks for a TPM (to prevent installment on non developer systems) and on the other side gives PPC applications the ability to run on x86 systems. Even complex software like Office 2004 or Photoshop CS 2 runs perfectly.
What about graphics? OS X uses Quartz Extreme to smooth GUI animation and provide 3D applications like Chess or Grapher with OpenGL support. For the moment it only runs on Intel 915 integrated graphics - like a charm!
OS X has a cool way of adding hardware drivers. It uses so called precompiled kernel extensions which are in the /System/Library/Extensions folder. Usually you can’t use .kext drivers compiled for PPC (universal binaries aren’t spread yet. You can load drivers with kextload –i –t < .kext> or see which ones are loaded with kextstat. Look at Open Darwin for sources and additional info on programming your own stuff (It’s the system that lies beneath the non-open source Aqua GUI). Be aware that Darwin is very similar to any other unix system - so just do your usual stuff :-). If you’re looking for an opensource network driver for OS X check tulip or wireless drivers (still need porting to x86).
When running into problems, try booting either with –x (safe mode), -s (single user), -v (verbose) or –f (reload configuration). Also try to combine the switches, they sometimes help. If you don’t see the Darwin boot loader screen press the Ctrl key during startup and you should get the boot loader command line.

Good places to look for more geek information are:

• Osx86project (wiki, forum, IRC)
• Win2osx
• 360hacker
• uneasysilence

So be aware that installing OS X on your x86 system is illegal without holding a valid developer license (read the rumors regarding the slow response of Apple Legal). It’s really still “freak stuff”? because not a lot of hardware is supported. It’s more like a “proof of concept”? than a cheaper Mac for everyday use.