Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Software, Hacks, How-tos, Cult of Mac
My day in the Mactel underground installing OS x86
Last week I was listening to This Week in Tech, with the golden voice of Leo Laporte. Apparently Leo had refused a copy of os x86 that had been offered to him by some punk kids. Me? I love punk kids. They pay my bills (because I'm paid to teach them). So it was with great glee that one such punk kid let me know about a little experiment... He and some friends were going to put OS x86 on his Dell. He offered transportation to an undisclosed site where the grand plan would unfold, and I told him I'd check it out.Brace yourself for a walk through the seamy underbelly of Macdom. Let's face it, all this business has Apple a little ruffled. And Mac purists just roll their eyes, knowing whatever comes out of Cupertino next year will be loads better than the VAIO's, Dells, and e-Machines currently sporting the little OS that could. I'm going to explain what we had to go through to get all this working, and what we had by the end of the day. Read on— if you dare!
My buddy (and his brethren) had of course obtained a copy of os x86 that's been making the rounds on Bittorrent. It's the VMWare one from "Curtis" but for our purposes we were going to run it without VMWare. This is the method we found over at 360hacker.net. Unfortunately, the "how to" was a little lacking, which cost us a lot of time. By the way, I noticed the post at 360 has changed somewhat since it was first posted, but several errors are still there.
Since the first step had been done for us, we proceeded to pop the 2 GB+ DVD with the .bz2 file on it into a PowerMac G5 tower. We had an external USB drive (80 GB) and plugged it in. After unpacking the tar twice to get inside, we had a number of files inside a folder. You only need ONE for the 360hacker method. All those other files are for the VMWare install (I think). The OS X image file is a little over 6 GB! So when we tried to copy to our external HD, it didn't work. Why? Because the drive came from the factory formatted as FAT32. And as you Windoze converts might know, you can't have files over 2 GB on a FAT32 drive.
Unfortunately, what made sense next didn't readily come to us. Ideally all we had to do was plug the drive into the PC, reformat as NTFS, and using the network (between the Dell and Mac), transfer the file. Slower, but effective. Instead, like a bunch of boneheads, we reformatted the drive as a UNIX volume. Once again, failure. At least we knew HFS+ wouldn't work, because Ubuntu wouldn't read it. We reformatted the drive as NTFS on the PC side after that, only to discover NTFS volumes on the Mac are read-only! Why this insistence on using the Mac? Because unpacking tar's on Windows makes baby Jesus cry.
So we figured it out. It took surprisingly little time to send that 6 GB file from Mac to PC (external drive) over the network. Once the .img file was on there we were ready to rock. Unfortunately the guy who was supposed to bring the Ubuntu live CD had left it at home. So we started to download the ISO... And that's when we went out for brunch.
Once we had a Live CD for Ubuntu, we thought we were ready. Ubuntu is really slick. I've used Red Hat, Knoppix, Linspire, and Fedora, but Ubuntu was quite cool. The live CD worked flawlessly, and when I plugged in the external HD it magically appeared on the desktop. First time I'd seen that on a Linux distro, but maybe only because it's the first time I'd ever tried. Anyway, I opened up the removable drive and saw our image file. Now we were ready to rock and roll.
Sadly, it was not to be. None of us could remember how to use spaces when doing a simple cd command to get into the external drive in the command line. In other words, we couldn't navigate to our image file within the Terminal. Dang. Now we had to go in and rename the volume, which meant a trip back to Windows. Ug. By the way, the instructions we used said to get to the external volume using /Devices, but that didn't work. We used /media and it worked...
Once we changed the name of "New Volume" to "NewVolume" things went better. We could see the file in Terminal. Now we carefully typed in the magic bit of code necessary to copy the image file to the Dell's internal HD... It was a lot like casting a secret enchantment. As my friend read the command aloud and typed, we all mouthed the words...
What did we get? Permission denied. Over and over (tried all hda's). Problem was, this particular drive we were using had a Seagate drive with Fedora on it. Somehow this drive had become locked, so that even as root we couldn't reformat or write over it. Stupid permissions!
After trying two or three floppy-based methods of erasing the drive, I was ready to get a magnet. This thing was locked up tighter than a fruit fly's rear-end. Then somebody sitting in the corner, nursing a bold blend from Starbucks, suggested going to Seagate's site and using their tools. Duh!
OK, Ubuntu Live CD, check. External drive with disk image, check. Internal drive with permssion to overwrite? Finally, a check. The magic DD command did the rest. A mere 8 minutes later and we were looking at each other with anticipation. Did it work? It looks like it's done!
We shut the machine down, ejecting the CD, unplugging the external HD, and sitting back for a moment. Taking a deep breath, we booted up. And lo and behold, there was the grey Apple logo! Unfortunately, again, we were stymied. It hung. We rebooted again, this time choosing Safe Boot. Success! Oh, wait, that password thing...
The 360hacker post mentions some diagnostic screen, and more CLI codes. Quite frankly, we never got there. The machine seemed to hang up when we tried, and we never got to the command line. So we ran a quick Google search for deadmoo's password. Within seconds we were booting up again, and this time, it was for real.
I cannot describe the surreal feeling of seeing the Mac OS running on a Dell box. For a moment I felt like I was in the bowels of Apple's secret labs (which would be a lot more like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" than I care to admit). A kid in a candy store. It was also a little creepy. But there it went. Dashboard worked, Safari launched, everything seemed in order. Since we're in safe mode it wouldn't connect to the internet, but no matter. It was working! We never could boot normally.
So what's it like? On our machine, which is a stock Optiplex with a 2.4 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, x86 was very slow. A little bit of lag between click and response. I noticed a bit of graphic noise every time a menu fade out effect or other graphic candy was supposed to happen. When we opened up Activity Monitor we saw our problem: the processor was at 100% all the time! I have no idea why.
Ultimately there's no way we're going to be using this as a production machine. I know some people have had super-zippy systems running at tremendous speed, but I just didn't see it. Besides, we destroyed the disc and erased the drive. So please Apple, don't sue me. Still, it was fun while it lasted. Now I hope I never have to see another Dell running OS X for as long as I live.
Since the first step had been done for us, we proceeded to pop the 2 GB+ DVD with the .bz2 file on it into a PowerMac G5 tower. We had an external USB drive (80 GB) and plugged it in. After unpacking the tar twice to get inside, we had a number of files inside a folder. You only need ONE for the 360hacker method. All those other files are for the VMWare install (I think). The OS X image file is a little over 6 GB! So when we tried to copy to our external HD, it didn't work. Why? Because the drive came from the factory formatted as FAT32. And as you Windoze converts might know, you can't have files over 2 GB on a FAT32 drive.
Unfortunately, what made sense next didn't readily come to us. Ideally all we had to do was plug the drive into the PC, reformat as NTFS, and using the network (between the Dell and Mac), transfer the file. Slower, but effective. Instead, like a bunch of boneheads, we reformatted the drive as a UNIX volume. Once again, failure. At least we knew HFS+ wouldn't work, because Ubuntu wouldn't read it. We reformatted the drive as NTFS on the PC side after that, only to discover NTFS volumes on the Mac are read-only! Why this insistence on using the Mac? Because unpacking tar's on Windows makes baby Jesus cry.
So we figured it out. It took surprisingly little time to send that 6 GB file from Mac to PC (external drive) over the network. Once the .img file was on there we were ready to rock. Unfortunately the guy who was supposed to bring the Ubuntu live CD had left it at home. So we started to download the ISO... And that's when we went out for brunch.
Once we had a Live CD for Ubuntu, we thought we were ready. Ubuntu is really slick. I've used Red Hat, Knoppix, Linspire, and Fedora, but Ubuntu was quite cool. The live CD worked flawlessly, and when I plugged in the external HD it magically appeared on the desktop. First time I'd seen that on a Linux distro, but maybe only because it's the first time I'd ever tried. Anyway, I opened up the removable drive and saw our image file. Now we were ready to rock and roll.
Sadly, it was not to be. None of us could remember how to use spaces when doing a simple cd command to get into the external drive in the command line. In other words, we couldn't navigate to our image file within the Terminal. Dang. Now we had to go in and rename the volume, which meant a trip back to Windows. Ug. By the way, the instructions we used said to get to the external volume using /Devices, but that didn't work. We used /media and it worked...
Once we changed the name of "New Volume" to "NewVolume" things went better. We could see the file in Terminal. Now we carefully typed in the magic bit of code necessary to copy the image file to the Dell's internal HD... It was a lot like casting a secret enchantment. As my friend read the command aloud and typed, we all mouthed the words...
What did we get? Permission denied. Over and over (tried all hda's). Problem was, this particular drive we were using had a Seagate drive with Fedora on it. Somehow this drive had become locked, so that even as root we couldn't reformat or write over it. Stupid permissions!
After trying two or three floppy-based methods of erasing the drive, I was ready to get a magnet. This thing was locked up tighter than a fruit fly's rear-end. Then somebody sitting in the corner, nursing a bold blend from Starbucks, suggested going to Seagate's site and using their tools. Duh!
OK, Ubuntu Live CD, check. External drive with disk image, check. Internal drive with permssion to overwrite? Finally, a check. The magic DD command did the rest. A mere 8 minutes later and we were looking at each other with anticipation. Did it work? It looks like it's done!
We shut the machine down, ejecting the CD, unplugging the external HD, and sitting back for a moment. Taking a deep breath, we booted up. And lo and behold, there was the grey Apple logo! Unfortunately, again, we were stymied. It hung. We rebooted again, this time choosing Safe Boot. Success! Oh, wait, that password thing...
The 360hacker post mentions some diagnostic screen, and more CLI codes. Quite frankly, we never got there. The machine seemed to hang up when we tried, and we never got to the command line. So we ran a quick Google search for deadmoo's password. Within seconds we were booting up again, and this time, it was for real.
I cannot describe the surreal feeling of seeing the Mac OS running on a Dell box. For a moment I felt like I was in the bowels of Apple's secret labs (which would be a lot more like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" than I care to admit). A kid in a candy store. It was also a little creepy. But there it went. Dashboard worked, Safari launched, everything seemed in order. Since we're in safe mode it wouldn't connect to the internet, but no matter. It was working! We never could boot normally.
So what's it like? On our machine, which is a stock Optiplex with a 2.4 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, x86 was very slow. A little bit of lag between click and response. I noticed a bit of graphic noise every time a menu fade out effect or other graphic candy was supposed to happen. When we opened up Activity Monitor we saw our problem: the processor was at 100% all the time! I have no idea why.
Ultimately there's no way we're going to be using this as a production machine. I know some people have had super-zippy systems running at tremendous speed, but I just didn't see it. Besides, we destroyed the disc and erased the drive. So please Apple, don't sue me. Still, it was fun while it lasted. Now I hope I never have to see another Dell running OS X for as long as I live.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
fra said 12:52PM on 9-01-2005
Safe mode... I was under the impression it booted as the full OS...
Oh well... least my copy of tiger has an internet connection.
Reply
Buthidae said 9:33PM on 9-01-2005
"When we opened up Activity Monitor we saw our problem: the processor was at 100% all the time! I have no idea why."
Am I the only person who gets a sort of sick satisfaction out of knowing their 500MHz-G3-sporting 7600 from almost a decade ago has a decent advantage over a late-model Dell? :-)
Reply
janeiro said 1:00PM on 9-01-2005
you can use the escape character () to delimit spaces at the command line. if you're using bash for your shell (which IIRC, Ubuntu uses by default), simply hitting tab will auto-complete the name for you, correctly delimitted.
rather lackluster experience it seems. for a bunch of guys trying to *hack* OS X onto a box, there didn't seem to be a lot of unix background, which would have helped some.
i guess the moral of the story is: grandma ain't putting OS X on her eMachine anytime soon. it doesn't seem like apple really has that much to worry about.
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David Gates said 1:05PM on 9-01-2005
"And as you Windoze converts might know, you can't have files over 2 GB on a FAT32 drive."
Minor quibble: FAT32 supports files up to 4GB, it's FAT16 with the 2GB cap. Still can't handle your 6GB image, of course.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
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Scott said 1:10PM on 9-01-2005
My copy of Tiger has a net connection too... but it also has a 20" iMac screen that came with it too! ;)
Reply
logich said 1:13PM on 9-01-2005
It all could have been done on the G5. There was no need for Ubuntu, Windows or NTFS, since you have dd available in OS X.
Find your USB drive's device name using Get Info in Disk Utility. Unmount any open volumes on that disk. Then go to the terminal and type a command line like the following (subsitute your device for disk2):
dd if=tiger-x86.img of=/Devices/disk2 bs=1M
Reply
Wheels said 1:20PM on 9-01-2005
With all that aggravation, resulting in nothing but a useless installation, it'd be worth it just to pay a little more for the real thing.
Here's a question, is the legit X86 version, that's meant for developers, seeing the same bugs that we're seeing in Tiger, or is it having different bugs/issues? I think I know that the answers obvious, but, at the same time, I'm wondering.
Reply
John Cruz said 1:16PM on 9-01-2005
The CPU usage is running at 100% because there's some files you have yet to delete that are constantly running checks. Also, I don't know who told you to use Ubuntu, but it's a joke for this. It won't mount the hard drives for crap. Knoppix is the only way to go. The following are my instructions that are amended versions of the ones found at the X-BOX 360 forum. I'm running this version of the install on a 2.0ghz pentium and it flies
1) Get tiger-x86.tar.bz2
2) Unpack tiger-x86-flat.img to a NTFS hard drive (internal if duel HD system or external USB if single HD system)
3) Load up the system with the Knoppix (linux) live CD. SuSE may also work, Ubuntu has issues with it.
4) If the drive with the img file is external, plug it in and let Knoppix see it
5) Open up the terminal
a. Type su to change to root
b. Navigate to the directory with the image file
i. /mnt/hda1/ if its on your hard drive in the PC (probably)
ii. /mnt/sda1/ if its on an external drive (probably, count be /mnt/usb1/ or something like that.)
c. Type ls all to make sure you see the .img file
d. Type dd bs=1048576 if=./tiger-x86-flat.img of=/dev/hda
i. It will be hda if first drive, hdb if second drive, hdc if third, etc. For me it was hdc because I have 3 hard drives and was installing to the 3rd one
6) Wait for it to finish copying. Once its done, reboot the PC, selecting the drive you want as the startup from the bios or boot menu
7) If all works well, you should be at a logon screen right now
a. If the system hangs, Boot with the x parameter at the Darwin boot screen to go into safe mode.
8) Youll see you can log in as deadmoo enter bovinity as the password and log in
a. If that doesnt work, reboot the system and boot with the s parameter to boot into safe mode.
i. Type sh /etc/rc to boot the system
ii. Type passwd curtis to change dadmoos password
iii. Enter a new password, reboot machine
b. Youll be set now
9) Once in, go to the Apple Menu ?ystem prefs ?sers. Make your own account, deadmoo is no longer needed.
10) Log out, log in as yourself. Go back to user prefs and delete deadmoo.
11) Delete the file /System/Library/Extentions/AppleTPMACPI.ktext
a. If it gives you crap about it being in use, hold down the windows key and empty trash, then itll die
b. Reboot the comp
12) Youre good to go!
Reply
TheDoode said 1:50PM on 9-01-2005
At first I thought you chose the most difficult installation method, guaranteeing a poor install. You know, for misinformation purposes. But then it all came together, it was ignorance.
And as you Windoze converts might know, you can't have files over 2 GB on a FAT32 drive.
Incorrect
-and-
will be loads better than the VAIO's, Dells, and e-Machines
Please, what sane person buys these toys? Real geeks built their own systems. OS x86 installed natively on a properly build machine screams faster than my PowerBook and iMac G5.
Reply
g0at said 1:52PM on 9-01-2005
JOhn Cruz, I see parts of my guide on your post.....
At least give some credit fag. It's people like you that makes me not want to give back to the community.
If the author would like to contact me, I can share several methods for speading up OS X x86.
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alex said 2:24PM on 9-01-2005
good god, guys! while it's cool you tried it out and all, you should really learn some *nix. Good job on making it work, though!
Reply
Boris said 3:00PM on 9-01-2005
This review is useless, the person that wrote this obviously doesn't know anything about *nix or any logical sense whatsoever. When OSX is installed properly, works like a charm. Until people don't build a moron installer for windows, we're stuck at bad impressions like this.
Reply
cauldron said 3:20PM on 9-01-2005
Comments on the osx86project wiki and forums would tend to indicate that the CPU usage and graphic artifacts have both been long fixed. There's even a patch available that will create an installable DVD, from which you can boot and use Apple's installer.
You say to brace ourselves for a trip through the seamy underbelly, but most of this article consists of "we had no idea what we were doing, but we kind of stumbled along!" The "underbelly" would be, like, some guy running OS X on two Dells and a ThinkPad and syncing them all with .Mac. The *seamy* underbelly would be people like the osx86project poster Maxxuss, who patched the Mach kernel to emulate SSE3 instructions on SSE2 processors(!).
Me, I'm very intrigued by all this, but what *I'm* hoping to get out of the Intel transition is just a faster iBook with more battery life. And maybe better ported games.
Reply
Chispa said 4:21PM on 9-01-2005
You realize that there is a copy floating out there in the neverland known as the Internet that is a Bootable Install DVD that incorporates all the patches/hacks so that you can:
a) Install from a scratch (no need to use any Ubuntu disc or a dd program)
b) Select the options to incorporate various hacks/patches to run Mac OSX
c) Modify partition information as to how much space Mac OSX will take up.
Granted there's a bit more tweaking that you would have to do to enable sound. And that tweak is mostly copying the /Extensions folder from openDarwin over to this bootable Install DVD via Transmac.
Nevertheless, this aside, it would seem that this news on TAUW is a wee bit outdated. But then again, that's just the opinion of a script kiddie.
Reply
spear said 4:42PM on 9-01-2005
hey guys,
i have one quick question. can i install osx86 on a had drive that has 2 partitions? ( i want to install it into my laptop)
if yes, is 6GB of space enough?
thx
Reply
J said 4:47PM on 9-01-2005
I've have tried this too, a while ago i ordered a brand new compter with 1.5 gigs of ram and a 3.2 ghz Pentium D (thats dual core) proccessor speciffically for putting osx86 on it. I had master it after trying it on an old hp and then reverting it back to windows. Ive found that OSX will take full advantage of the dual core and runs at blazing speeds. Faster than any powermac ive ever seen.
Reply
ruindpzzle said 5:10PM on 9-01-2005
John has it right, I did it basically the same way he did, and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. I'm a little shocked that you had such a hard time. Anyway, mine is fast. and I do have internet, wireless and lan, and my bluetooth card works as well, it does take a little tweaking and experimenting, but he covers the basics to do it yourself.
it seems he made a small typo though, -s is single user mode, not safe mode, I'm sure he knows that, cause he mentioned -x above. try it out guys, its fun, just don't expect it to work right "out of the box" good luck!
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Rob said 6:34PM on 9-01-2005
Thanks, a great interesting read. I too, don't want to see OS X on anything but an Apple box.
Reply
Velvet Nightmare said 7:42PM on 9-01-2005
Look, the only reason that you were "running sluggishly" or "very slowy" is because you left in the AppleTPMACPI.ktext resource files. This thing constantly checks your computer for the TPM, which it will never find. All that you have to do is:
1. Navigate to /System/Library/Extentions/AppleTPMACPI.ktext
2. Drag to the trash.
3. Authenticate ("bovinity")
4. Reboot
Enjoy OSX86 without any lag.
Reply
xSmurf said 10:35PM on 9-01-2005
Big up guys! I wish I had the hardware to try it out to!
IIRC you are a switcher (?) and probably have not used os x since it's beginning. If it is the case I wish you best luck with *nix stuff. To be honnest I knew barely anything before os x. Now I get my way around in many different distro and have to thanks os x as it allowed me to painlessly learn. To all that posted arsh comments... Big down, this has been around on the net before. These guys are not trying to be Teh Leetness, they just wanna let people who don't have time, courage or chance to do it for themselves know how it feels, and figure it out for themselves obviously!
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