Building the Ultimate Classic Mac.

[Liam Proven]

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&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2005793

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-apfs-apples-new-file-system/

> I'd rather install a 20 year old OS I've never seen versus OSX on VMware,
> but that's just me.

Partly. ;-)



-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)