wcmary Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 I own a legal copy of the OSX 10.4.6, as well as 10.5 and would like to make a hackintosh legally, or at least only break the rule of putting it on hardware other than a Mac. More specifically, I'd like to get it to work on VMWare. I have followed every tutorial I can find, every mod discussed on this board and I can't get the DVD to even boot in VMWare, much less "follow the on-screen instructions in Tiger". My question is a general and important one: Is the ONLY way to do this to download something illegal? Or can I modify my own iso image / Apple issued DVD ROM somehow? Thanks, WC <We have had so many threads asking "Where do I download OSx86" that I thought I would make this definitive thread to discuss downloading it. First, you should know that downloading OSx86 is totally illegal. Period. Even if you owned your own copy and downloaded it via bittorrent, you're still sharing it with people who don't. Secondly, it's immoral. Apple has spent thousands of man-hours working on OS X and you're getting it for nothing. You're not helping Apple along and you're not helping yourself in the long run. Most people download OS x86 via bittorrent and usually find it on the Pirate Bay or Demonoid. These are not the only two sites but they are the ones most talked about. I tell you this not because this site supports pirating (we don't) and doesn't support search engines (we do) . Information needs to be shared, and as long as its not illegal information (which this hardly is) we'll be happy to share it!> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shoarthing Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 . . . My question is a general and important one: Is the ONLY way to do this to download something illegal? Or can I modify my own iso image / Apple issued DVD ROM somehow? . . various patching tutorials here. The morality of this sort of activity iffy at best. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wcmary Posted October 25, 2007 Author Share Posted October 25, 2007 <. . various patching tutorials here. The morality of this sort of activity iffy at best.> Thanks for the reply and the link, shoarthing. Isn't the morality of everyone on this board in question? That is, unless everyone's speaking hypothetically instead of actually installing OSX on PC's... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beheivjer Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 i own a mac and i own a pc and i have morals but this isnot a morallity issue to me. you cant buy the software to use on something besides what they sell you. even as a mac tester it is wrong. 10.5 isnt released yet so either you stole that or you are a tester which i doubt seems you are here already. morallity should not be a question asked on the net. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Conroe Mac Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 What is legal and what is moral overlap but they aren't in perfect congruency. While purchasing a dvd and then modifying it might ease your moral conscience, it is still illegal at best. Apple offers the OS X product to customers that purchase their hardware for use on their hardware. Some would say it is immoral to run their OS on any computer other than Apple hardware because you are cutting into the money the developers would make from the sale of Apple hardware. Modifying a disc does not necessarily make one any more moral. There isn't much difference between making or downloading something illegally. You've taken the first step towards morality by supporting Apple with money. If you want to be legal, you'll buy Apple hardware. Aside from the money, creating your own hackintosh dvd is not any morally better than downloading one as far as I'm concerned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wcmary Posted October 25, 2007 Author Share Posted October 25, 2007 I could really care less about the morality / legality of the issue. I just want to make it work. And while I'm sure I could find the downloads necessary, I figure those downloads had to come from somewhere and why should I mess with them if I already have a legally purchased copy that I installed on my legally purchased Mac? I only mentioned the morality thing because it's funny to me that someone else would mention it in a community (this forum) that is based entirely on an illegal / immoral activity. It's kind of like someone in prison saying, "Hey you shouldn't have done that." Either no one here has actually created a hackintosh, or those that have have broken the law, which is based on morality in a sense, and thus so can be considered immoral. Again, I really don't care. I don't care if Britney shaves her head, either. But I am still trying to get this to work without a download. All of the tutorials I saw on the link provided earlier (osx86scene) require the use of some kind of image to make the image I want, thus defeating the point. Has anyone here taken an actual Apple bootable DVD and created a hackintosh on VMWare with it? That is what I'm trying to get to work, preferably with a portable hard disc file so I can test Mac hacking stuff without having to blow away a full install each time I trash it... Oh, and just to tie up all loose ends... I have a copy of 10.5 because FedEx delivered my legally bought copy this morning, as they did many other people. Check out MacRumors for more info. Nothing illegal about it. Cheers, WC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrjoe Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 I thought leopard wasn't officially released yet! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Conroe Mac Posted October 25, 2007 Share Posted October 25, 2007 You can get it done without a download, but you'll need some good unix skills and a thorough understanding of how the operating system works. Frankly, if you've never done it before, you're going to be working for days on end. There's a reason it takes an entire community of people across the world to make the hackintosh work. You're better off using a downloaded .iso. You've already paid Apple to clear your conscience so I wouldn't worry about downloading. Doing it yourself is possible, but not very feasible for one person. You'll waste more time in the end than it is actually worth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wcmary Posted October 25, 2007 Author Share Posted October 25, 2007 <You can get it done without a download, but you'll need some good unix skills and a thorough understanding of how the operating system works. Frankly, if you've never done it before, you're going to be working for days on end. There's a reason it takes an entire community of people across the world to make the hackintosh work. You're better off using a downloaded .iso. You've already paid Apple to clear your conscience so I wouldn't worry about downloading. Doing it yourself is possible, but not very feasible for one person. You'll waste more time in the end than it is actually worth.> Fair enough. I just figured there would be a step by step manual on this somewhere... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Conroe Mac Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. One of the reasons OS X "just works" is because it uses very specifically controlled hardware. Apple knows exactly what hardware is underneath their computers and so they design their OS to work perfectly with it. There is no definitive hackintosh guide, because every PC is different. Every PC contains different combinations of hardware so the type of hacks necessary to run OS X is very varied. Thus, if you wanted to run OS X on your computer, you would have to join every thread for each piece of hardware in your computer and code the hundreds of lines of code that has been written already. Basically, you'd be cutting and pasting so the difference between doing it yourself and using the work that has been done isn't really all that meaningful. It would take you many days and likely weeks to hack everything and, assuming you are not versed in unix, you wouldn't understand about 80% of what you were doing anyways. It is a nice idea certainly, but it's just not practical. I know that might not be the answer that you were looking for, but having been in the hackintosh community for some time, it is my experience and I don't think you will find a community of people looking to modify from scratch. Even those of us working on the initial 10.5 installs from the GM disc are working from years of experience, kexts, patches, etc, to get something working. Leopard is not being cracked in a day. People have been cracking it since it was beta and before that from the parts that were in Tiger. Like any complicated collaborative project, it becomes specialized and there is probably no one person that could create an install disc, nor should there be when we can work together to produce quick and useful results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loccy Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 While purchasing a dvd and then modifying it might ease your moral conscience, it is still illegal at best. No it isn't - or at least it isn't in Europe. Apple offers the OS X product to customers that purchase their hardware for use on their hardware. Which is probably against European (and certainly British) anti-competition laws. See the case in Europe where Microsoft had to offer a version of Windows with Media Center stripped out. Apple can sell an OS that is only compatible with a specific hardware manufacturer's kit, that's fine. But they cannot stop enterprising individuals who find a way to make it work on other kit. Some would say it is immoral to run their OS on any computer other than Apple hardware because you are cutting into the money the developers would make from the sale of Apple hardware. I will just answer this with the smiley I honestly don't understand Apple's approach to the hack community. As a long-time Windows user and even long Mac sceptic I recently bought a Sony Vaio and it came with Vista. After about a week of using Vista I gave up in frustration and looked around for another OS. The OSX86 community seemed to have come on in leaps and bounds since I last played with it a couple of years ago (back in the Deadmoo days) so I decided to have a stab at that, and dual-boot Ubuntu to use as my primary OS. The Hackintosh'ed Vaio worked so well that Ubuntu fell by the wayside and OSX became my primary OS. For office/work use it was fine; for personal use for media etc the 10% of drivers I had missing became frustrating. In the end I stuck the Vaio on ebay and bought a Macbook. So as a result of the OSX86 scene (and partly because Vista is utter utter {censored}) you now have a died-in-the-wool techie, who otherwise wouldn't have gone near Apple, who has become a Mac and OSX evangelist. And I am by no means alone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wcmary Posted October 26, 2007 Author Share Posted October 26, 2007 <There is no definitive hackintosh guide, because every PC is different. Every PC contains different combinations of hardware so the type of hacks necessary to run OS X is very varied.> Absolutely. That is why I want to run it on VMWare - the hardware is predictible, and the same no matter what computer you put it on. The only differences would between versions of VMWare. And, while I don't know this to be a fact <yet>, I believe you could take a virtual machine from VMWare on Windows and then run it on VMWare on Linux... and yes, maybe VMWare on a Mac... Solve the problem once, and millions of people with VMWare would be able to run it with everything working. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinghed Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 Please remember, that if apple really wanted to shut all this down, they could... It isn't hard to find or chat to all the people who are creating/hacking these distributions. Obviously we all know this isn't really a grey area - i.e. we shouldn't be doing it. But Apple know full well that it isn't as straightforward as it first seems, and that most people wont even move from IE to Firefox let alone install a new OS on their Dell/generic PC. They know that most of us are essentially curious geeks and most of us spend more time fiddling with our installations as opposed to doing any real work on them... What I suppose I'm trying to say is find it, install it, try to make it work - if you like it and you like the apple experience, you'd be better off buying a Mac, cos in the long run it is officially supported and you just don't have the software niggles that OSX86 has. But if you just like to muck about with software have fun... here endeth the ramblings of a confused mind... R Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azurael Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 I think in EU law, Reverse Engineering for the purposes of ensuring interoperability is legal. You would not be able to redistribute that modified DVD, obviously, nor any patches which contained Apple proprietary code. However, it is probably legal to use OSX86 in Europe with a self-modified, purchased OS X DVD. Apple's license clause requiring installation on Apple-supplied hardware would not be binding under EU-law, because, again, it prevents interoperability. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RPS Posted October 26, 2007 Share Posted October 26, 2007 ;) :censored2:http://forum.insanelymac.com/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif I own a mac too, but i installed OSX 10.4.9 on my pc. I think that apple shouldn't be so selfish saying "Apple For mac" Windows works on mac so why doesn't osx work @LEGALY@ Screw apple But i love OSX PS. How do i make a signature?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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