19 Jul
2016
19 Jul
'16
3:33 p.m.
On 19 July 2016 at 16:08, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
IMHO, it's a PITA and not really worth it.
That's my impression, yes.
Hardware-based Hackintoshes can
be fast and somewhat well supported.
I know, because I hackintoshed my PC in London before I left.
It was a decent machine off the local Freecycle group -- Core 2 Quad
Extreme, 8GB RAM, SATA DVD-RW. No hard disks or graphics card, which I
cannibalised off my old PC.
As it was the first all-Intel machine I'd had in a long long time --
well over a decade -- I tried hackintoshing it. (At first, it ran
Ubuntu, natch, and I also tried Windows 8 on it for a month or so
before the eval period expired and it started nagging.)
It took days of trial and error but it worked. I intentionally used
Snow Leopard (although Mountain Lion was by then current) because [a]
I wanted PowerPC app support, mainly for MS Office 2004 and [b] it was
an old version already, so probably no patches would come along and
break my installtion.
It worked fine and was a fast, useful, stable machine. I intentionally
didn't try to get sleep/resume working -- it was a desktop; when not
in use, I turned it off. One boot in 50 might fail but a press of the
reset button and it always came up. Floppy drive and PS/2 ports didn't
work, but I could always just reboot into Ubuntu for them.
When I get the box over here, I might try to get it running a more
modern version, just for kicks.
You just have to be very careful
about what hardware you pick. If one decides to build one, I'd recommend
checking the Buyers Guide on http://www.tonymacx86.com.
I'm not that rich!
I bought a used Mac mini, with my 26Y old Apple ABD keyboard on it. :-)
As far as VMware or VirtualBox goes, that's a
different story. I've used
both of them and as of about a year or so ago, I didn't get satisfactory
results. For one, even when you use an EFI BIOS, you still need to load
EFI hackery-loaders, and driver-hacks to get it working.
Yes, tried that.
I tried to do it
the "legal way" by buying a copy of OSX Server standalone etc...
https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&c…
OK, never tried that!
Eventually I got a working guest VM with OSX on it,
but I think the
graphics drivers and other niggly bits were non-optimal to the point it
was just painful and slow to use. It took quite a bit of time even to get
it that far (lots of trial and error with the guest VM settings). Perhaps
things are easier these days, but I certainly couldn't recommend the
process unless you just wanted/needed OSX Server running in a VM for some
kind of infrastructure stuff. That's probably exactly what Apple intended,
too.
I'm tempted to, but the machine I'd want to run it on is AMD-based, so
I think the chances are not good.
BTW, I've heard it all runs peachy under OSX.
Obviously, I'm talking about
the host-server being FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows.
With Mac Minis and other OSX hardware being pretty accessible, and with my
bad-attitude toward most modern commercial OSs (app store full of malware
anyone?) I'm not enthusiastic enough to jack with VM'ing it much. My
impression is that Apple seems much more interested in iPhones and perhaps
tablets these days than some "old" desktop OS.
Up to a point, yes. But it's still a damned fine desktop, and the
least-hassle Unix there is. Ubuntu is getting close, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/17/computing-opensource
http://lifehacker.com/5993401/im-cory-doctorow-and-this-is-how-i-work
You'd think a company with a bazillion notional
dollars equity value would
have a few spare cycles for keeping the OS interesting. However, lately,
my impression is that their idea of "interesting" seems to mean they put
higher walls around the garden. Oh, wait, they are making it mo' betta'
for to read in traditional Chinese and throwing in a bunch of bundled
application tweaks that have little to do with the actual OS. Uhh.
Grreeeeaaaaat.
I have no issues with it myself. I don't use Apple phones or laptops,
I don't have a tablet, so the integration features are irrelevant to
me. I don't use Apple's email client, chat client, calendar, notes,
cloud storage, anything. Mostly I use FOSS and freeware apps, so
there's no tie-in for me.
But the integration is, I hear, amazing and best-of-breed.
I gather they're adding Siri to the next version, macOS Sierra, and
after that, there will be more AI features. Not sure that I want any
of that, but we'll see.
Hey Apple, you might want a modern volume management
scheme (ie.. not Core
Storage) before you slap "Server" on anything else. It's no small wonder
OSX Server was a failure in the marketplace.
Well, they nearly added ZFS, but bottled out, possibly due to Oracle
and its licensing. Now they're working on a new one:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/digging-into-the-dev-documentation-for…
I'd rather install a 20 year old OS I've never
seen versus OSX on VMware,
but that's just me.
Partly. ;-)
--
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