My personal osx86 story!

First off I would like to state that this is my first post on the forums, but I have been reading them for quite some time now. I just want to show my appreciation in any way possible and for now the best way may be to share my true mac story! I also would like to apologize in advanced for I am nearly certain that this isn't the best place for this topic, if a moderator would kindly move it to the appropriate location I would be grateful.

Let's begin with the short history of my computer usage. I am currently 23 years old and live on my own, blah blah. I got my first computer when I was 8 (an OS/2 with it's own special OS which we removed and loaded Windows 3.11, my dad and I struggled for months to replace the PC-DOS with MS-DOS, I don't remember much else). I later sold that computer and replaced it with one that had Windows 95 and I was filled with glee, to say the least! I struggled on both computers with understanding how sound/video drivers work. If memory serves correctly that computer had 16-colors because I didn't have the proper video drivers. I tried to sell this computer to gain a replacement, but the person who purchased it was my father's boss's daughter (lol) and she whined enough that my dad's boss put him into a position where he had to spend the money they bought the computer with to upgrade it to their standards. I lost my computer .

Once I hit 7th grade (or the summer after), I began working for my dad's company part-time doing data-entry and production work and I gained enough money to build my FIRST computer from scratch. Before this I helped my dad once make his custom PC and we learned quite a lot through trial-and-error. I was able to build a Cyrix M3 300mhz PC with Windows98 and a 4.3gb Hard Drive (lol?). I don't remember much else about the hardware specs. I do remember buying my first DVD-Rom drive and adding it to the machine though!

That computer eventually became virus infected and reformatted multiple times. I got my hands on a real-deal copy of Windows 2000 Professional/Server Beta3 Public Test CD (a set of CD's actually) and I toyed with that for a while.

In favor of shortening the story I'll advance quicker through time: Throughout high-school my brother and I competed at who could build the best computer and through a series of upgrades (piece at a time) I went through probably 3 PC's worth of parts over the years, and by senior year I had an Athlon XP 2100+, water-cooled and over-clocked to 2.2ghz (equivalent to I believe a 2800 or 2900+ for those who don't understand AMD ratings). It was around this time that I began toying around with dual-booting Linux (Redhat 9 was my first). I got a laptop as part of a program for college and was pretty steadily back on windows after this time (I struggled with linux drivers, otherwise I loved it... still needed windows for gaming however). I began a summer job at a local Computer Repair shop (also built customs) in downtown mpls. It was here where I gained my first positive encounter with Mac OSX. A co-worker (who is now a very very good friend) introduced me to his iBook. I called him a traitor, as I was an avid PC fanboy who utterly despised Mac for no real reason at all. He finally convinced me (by locking me out of my computers and forcing me to pay him back by learning how to lock him out of his) to give them another chance. I fell in love with the OS. It was 10.2 if I'm not mistaken and it was gorgeous and intuitive and revolutionary and pretty much kicked Windows' a$$ in every aspect imaginable (imo).

After this I dug out my old copies of WindowBlinds (Stardock) and began trying to transform my Windows UI to look more mac. I used ObjectDock (Stardock) and other such mods to attempt to recreate the OSX environment on my PC. There were many failures but ever since that summer I always had an OSX skin of some sort on my PC. In my 2nd semester of college I became severely frustrated with my gateway laptop (and now hate gateway because of those awful computers) and traded it in for a real mac! (iBook:G4 with 768mb Memory 12" LCD). I was happy for the entire 2 years I had that computer (I sold my PC as I hated using it now).

I had to get rid of my Apple because it was under a lease with the school and I was violently shoved back into the Windows world where I frequently became angry with my computer and it's inability to be as pretty as OSX and function as well. I decided it was time to Linux as my hatred for windows had flamed into something uncontrollable. For me, windows had to be there as I play WoW so it was always installed. That is, until after 2 destro's worth of Fedora, I switched to Ubuntu (um... /drool /drool omghax it's COMPIZ-FUSION!!!) and started toying with Wine (had experience with Xine on my Apple attempting to run certain simple midi-based software on my G4). I was able to get WoW working. Long story short I was forced back into windows due to drivers not functioning properly and though everything native to linux worked, things like WoW and my guitar software and Ventrilo would never play nicely together. That and Dual-screen Compiz-Fusion not working with xinerama (the proper dual-screen option, the other option is frustratingly stupid at window management, also spans the bars across both screens and multiple resolutions was leaving me with space I could not access) led me back into Windows.

I've always read through these forums and wondered if I could get OSX on my pc. I always read the guides and saw things like "this is not for everyday use", or "this is a hobby and is extremely difficult" and was scared away at the though of not being able to enjoy OSX as things just wouldn't work properly. That and I use AMD and always will (Intel has better hardware, I know, I don't support their company and refuse to buy their product for reasons I won't get into). Well one weekend I was bored with WoW and my son was away and I happened to pick up a Kalyway disk for fun. I figured what the H3ll... I'll give it a try!

I didn't make it into the installer.

I have never, in my life, ever given up on anything that easily so I hit the forums and I hit them harder than I ever have (not posting as there is a plethora of information amongst the numerous noobular posts asking very simple things that can be easily googled for and I didn't want to add to the clouds of dust I had to sift through to find the real expert answers). I downloaded another distro, Lawless PPC I believe it is called. I was able to sometimes get into the installer but it would freeze up on the Apple most of the time. After some research I found an odd solution suggesting re-burning the image at the slowest speed permitted by the burner.

After doing this I got past the “Still waiting for root device” errors during setup and I reached my first taste of Aqua on my PC. I had made it into the installer. I ran my first setup of OSX onto my IDE 120gb drive and ventured into firstboot but never saw it happen. I did –v to see what was going on during boot and found the “Still waiting for root device” error again. I attempted many solutions like rd=disk0s1 at boot and such but never got in. I decided to switch around my hard drive configuration to be just the DVD and the target hard disk. I put the hard disk on master and the DVD on slave and got setup to run, finish, and my computer made it into firstboot. I chose randomly at the customize option as far as device support goes. I got a basic install with no video support, sound, or internet and had to dual-boot to windows to get things working.

I wrote down all of my devices, their ID’s for Vendor, Device, and Subsys and started researching. I was able to easily mount my windows hard disk from within mac so I could grab downloaded zips right off of my windows desktop folder when booted into osx. I tried various kexts for either net since that, obviously, would allow me to stay in osx for future research.

I was having some issues here and there getting things to work properly. Little history on the target disk: It was an old 120gb drive that occasionally would repeatedly click upon boot not allowing the BIOS to recognize it (where I would reboot the computer until it would POST without clicking). I found an old USB->IDE kit and stole the power source from it and got the 120gb to run off of that without clicking and from there on out powered it that way (to prevent the clicking issue on reboot). Well I decided I had enough of this, I was certain that if this OS was successful I would not want it on this drive anyway so I headed to BestBuy and picked up a new 500gb Sata3 (I went with the sata ignoring the potential for issues resulting in attempting to install with an unsupported raid controller). I started setup from scratch (this time choosing more appropriate driver options right out of the box). My chipset was not listed (it’s an AMD chipset on a Gigabyte board, which btw numerous guides say is very very difficult to get fully functional and is highly recommended against using for a haxintosh) so I selected VIA since I was fairly certain it shared many of the same components as mine (Realtec Audio/Ethernet). I also selected the proper NVInjext for my N’Vidia 7800GT 256mb card and was greeted with functioning video on first boot with dual-screen up and running out of the box, Ethernet as well.

Having those two out of the way right away was incredibly helpful (even though I think I could have fixed the video with no problems at all but the Ethernet I was still not sure which kext to use). I was able to enable the sound very simply without doing anything too serious. At this point I began installing OSX applications and getting everything organized.

I pretty much googled around the web (90% of results came from insanelymac forums) for solutions to problems I was having, mainly small glitches. I got everything in order, and last night I was able to get my final primary goal accomplished, I got my 6ch Surround Sound working (or 8ch, I have 4 stereo output devices and I can map them around however I please which is fantastical!). I tried many different kexts and packages for the ALC888 driver (the one that finally worked was the ALC888Audio.mpkg that I got from http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=34075 after hours and hours of searching.

To conclude this I would like to give my thanks to every single person that has poured hours and hours of effort into developing fixes and/or work-arounds for the problems generated by running osx on non-native hardware. I would also like to thank those who put together the “patched” install DVD’s, not to mention the people who worked so hard to incorporate AMD support into the project. And I cannot neglect thanking the people that pay for, maintain, moderate, administer, and develop this absolutely amazing and helpful community. In my entire history with computers, I have never, ever been happier. Thank you SO much. I wish I had what it takes to contribute back but I just don’t. I hope this article encourages the less experienced to not give up on their osx86project of their own, as well as encourage the geniuses out there to continue helping us enjoy an absolutely amazing operating system on our custom PC’s.

THANK YOU INSANELYMAC!!!